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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
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Essential
Congenial
Essentials
Dublin
Climate
Manhattan
Places
Italy
Light
Settled
Seems
Greatly
Live
Irish
Writing
France

More quotes by John Banville

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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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 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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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