John Banville Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I have a terrible habit of shopping after I go to the gym or hitting eBay.
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There are so many different criteria for my collecting, and I have to confess that the goalposts do shift. But obviously, with my background, I am particularly drawn to things that have been documented in contemporary magazines.
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At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.
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One of the most important tools we have at the Small Business Administration (SBA) to reach high growth entrepreneurs is the Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program.
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The politics of the Cape Town Metro, which allows an executive Mayoral committee to make secret decisions which affect you, behind closed doors, is wrong!
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I love the ubiquitous idly-dosa combination. In fact, that was my pet name as a kid! In school, I would bug the canteen boys to get me my daily quota of idly!
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Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.
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When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response.
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I am an ardent supporter of capitalism - but I also understand that while individuals have inalienable, God-given rights, corporations do not.
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The fact is that surveys which media people openly admit to show that fewer than twelve percent of their customers believe they're doing a good job, while the average profit margin in television is in the neighborhood of eighty percent.
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No adultery is bloodless.
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If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.
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In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
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But if there's an erosion at home, you know, Thomas Jefferson warned about a tyranny of an oligarchy and if we surrender our democracy to the tyranny of an oligarchy, we've made a terrible mistake.
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But when I go to Chicago, I know I'm home.
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The fun little proofs that you can do with algebra - they are sort of like crowd pleasers in a way. Like, the .9 repeating equaling one. It doesn't take a lot of algebra to prove that, and it's really fun. It kind of wows people. It's like they're watching magic happen right before their eyes.
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To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.
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The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
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God is not going to negotiate His holiness... in order to accommodate us.
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To be sure, we would not allow the world, if we can help it, to peep into our soul, much less to enter it. Our No-Man's-Land is hedged about with a wire entanglement of insincerities. And often we take refuge in a temperament, a pose, or a mystic mood.
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Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun.
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Change is one thing, progress is another.
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Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that's in short supply can't be carved up and shared without destroying it.
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The world is a dark place, and I find it endlessly funny.