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: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Self
Colored
Caked
Thing
Layers
Dissembling
Lifetime
Toffee
Shall
Varnish
Left
Soot
Away
Grime
Soul
Layer
Come
Strip

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
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Ian McEwan is a very good writer the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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