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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.

John Banville

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John Banville
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Free
Words
Volition
Born
Fictional
Character
Killed
Writing
Flesh
Made
Easily
Characters
Exercise

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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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