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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.

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
Went
Thirties
Reading
Nietzsche
Read
Superb
Voice
Spokes
Artist
Spoke
Back
Literary
Directly
Teenager

More quotes by 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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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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.
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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
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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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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
John Banville
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville