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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
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Even
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Think
Moments
Arrogant
Thinking
Night
Annoying
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Name
Annoy
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Announce
First
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Chairman
Many
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Jury

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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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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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