Quote

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

John Banville

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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Left
Soot
Away
Grime
Soul
Layer
Come
Strip
Self
Colored
Caked
Thing
Layers
Dissembling
Lifetime
Toffee
Shall
Varnish

More quotes by John Banville

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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
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The trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.
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Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power I lied to lie. It was a way of living lies are life's almost-anagram.
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I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.
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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.
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