Quote

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: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Firsts
Heard
Announce
First
Names
Chairman
Many
Moment
Jury
Even
Hate
Occurred
Think
Moments
Arrogant
Thinking
Night
Annoying
People
Thought
Naturally
Wanted
Name
Annoy

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I am the worst judge of my books.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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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The trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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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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 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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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 art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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.
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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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