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

More quotes by John Banville

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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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 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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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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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A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
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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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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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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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
John Banville