Quote

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
Made
Easily
Characters
Exercise
Free
Words
Volition
Born
Fictional
Character
Killed
Writing
Flesh

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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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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We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
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