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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.
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
Would
English
Writer
Alone
Half
Mcewan
Place
Atonement
Firsts
Ensure
First
Lasting
Good
Letters
More quotes by John Banville
I am the worst judge of my books.
John Banville
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.
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
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
John Banville
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
John Banville
No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
John Banville
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
John Banville
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John Banville