John Banville Quotes
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I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.
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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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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.
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These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.
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What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.
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I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.
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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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Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.
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A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.
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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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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.
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You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
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We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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 never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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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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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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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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To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
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In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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