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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
Strip
Come
Colored
Caked
Self
Layers
Dissembling
Thing
Lifetime
Toffee
Shall
Varnish
Soot
Left
Grime
Away
Layer
Soul
More quotes by John Banville
I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.
John Banville
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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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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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.
John Banville
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
John Banville
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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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.
John Banville