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

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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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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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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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 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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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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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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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