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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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Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
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More quotes by John Banville
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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 am the worst judge of my books.
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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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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.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville
