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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: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Reading
Nietzsche
Read
Superb
Voice
Spokes
Artist
Spoke
Back
Literary
Directly
Teenager
Went
Thirties

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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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.
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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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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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