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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.

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
Begin
Personal
Resides
Imagine
Dont
Individual
Individuality
Difficult
Absolutes
Find
Absolute
Look
Individuals
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Identity

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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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 secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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 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 art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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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.
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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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