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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

More quotes by John Banville

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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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All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power I lied to lie. It was a way of living lies are life's almost-anagram.
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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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 never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
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The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
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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 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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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
John Banville
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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
John Banville
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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville