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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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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Light
Settled
Seems
Greatly
Live
Irish
Writing
France
Like
Essential
Congenial
Essentials
Dublin
Climate
Manhattan
Places
Italy

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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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 never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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