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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
Family
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Revisit
Like
Fictitious
Protagonists
Delightful
Novels
Crime
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More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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.
John Banville
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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've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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.
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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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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.
John Banville
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville