John Banville Quotes
We all yearn in our hearts to be Larkin's 'shit in the shuttered chateau', but few of us achieve that grand apotheosis.

Quotes to Explore
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One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.
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I love recording music.
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I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.
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I hate camping, but I love summer camp.
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Knowing policy does help make the gossip more understandable.
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I live in, literally, the same home when I was swiping my first bank card and wondering if I'd have to put back the Charmin. We still don't have a dishwasher. My mom has done all these gardens so now my house looks like the garden shack in the middle of Versailles.
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If I present a boring personal life to my readers, it's going to be harder for them to think of my novels as thrilling.
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There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.
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The Gili Islands gave me some of my best scuba diving experiences, including tons of turtles.
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What really matters is who you are when you step on the field, and I will let my bat and my glove speak for themselves.
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I have differences of opinion within my own family, an Irish Catholic family. So, I do respect those that disagree.
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Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
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In Australia, there is a very famous show called 'Home and Away.' I was cast on that at 15. The day I started filming, my life changed.
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You know, Californians care about protecting their environment. So do I. But they also care about that in the context of a healthy economy.
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The immigration issue is, I recognize, one that generates a lot of passion, but it does not make sense for us to want to push talent out.
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'Pomegranate,' started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism.
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Shouldn't you put the same amount of effort into your giving as you might for your for-profit investments? After all, philanthropy is an investment, and one in which lives - not profits - are at stake.
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When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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I would come over here in the morning biting my lip in fear when the temperatures dropped below 10 degrees.
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The number of those endowed with human life is as small as the amount of earth one can place on a fingernail. Life as a human being is hard to sustain--as hard as it is for the dew to remain on the grass. But it is better to live a single day with honor than to live to 120 and die in disgrace.
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I like to accessorise shirts with a little ribbon tied round my collar or a country style ascot. I've also sewed little hearts on some of my sleeves which I've done for years because I always wear my heart on my sleeve so if you see a little embroidered heart on my clothes, that's why!
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We all yearn in our hearts to be Larkin's 'shit in the shuttered chateau', but few of us achieve that grand apotheosis.