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
Away
Grime
Soul
Layer
Come
Strip
Self
Colored
Caked
Thing
Layers
Dissembling
Lifetime
Toffee
Shall
Varnish
Left
Soot

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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.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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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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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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'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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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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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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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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