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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

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
Went
Didn
Self
Never
Impatient
Arrogant
Educated
University

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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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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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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
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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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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
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There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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