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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: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Easily
Made
Characters
Exercise
Free
Words
Volition
Born
Fictional
Killed
Character
Flesh
Writing

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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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 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'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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