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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
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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
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Benjamin Black
William John Banville
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More quotes by 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.
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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 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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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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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.
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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.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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