A Quote by John Banville

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher. — © John Banville
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown... There's something so hopelessly gross and vile about him it's hard to take him seriously.
I try very hard to be bad, but people never take me seriously.
A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.
To me the early childhood story is an ecumenical one. You take poverty seriously. You take seriously maternal depression. You take seriously children under stress and you take seriously the effects of extended hours participation in poor quality care. Those are the facts I begin with.
A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.
My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.
I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.
I saw myself as a writer, a novelist, even though I was living the life of a mother and housewife. Writing was - and is - what I do.
Critics of Donald Trump take him literally, but not seriously. His supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
There's really no reason for any musician, writer, actor to ever take themselves seriously. If you work in a needle exchange, take yourself seriously. You're doing good work. If you're involved in hostage negotiations and saving lives, you can have a sense of entitlement.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
An English philosopher said that whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do the best you can and don't take it so seriously.
Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
Let's take fashion seriously, but not ourselves so seriously. Or reverse that, maybe don't take fashion so seriously, but take yourself seriously. Actually, don't take yourself seriously, that's for sure. So, yeah, take fashion seriously, just not yourself.
A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
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