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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
Like
Fictitious
Protagonists
Delightful
Novels
Crime
Novel
Family
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Revisit

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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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 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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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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.
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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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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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