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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.

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
Crime
Novel
Family
Book
Revisit
Like
Fictitious
Protagonists
Delightful
Novels

More quotes by John Banville

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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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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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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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.
John Banville
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville