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

More quotes by John Banville

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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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 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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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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 never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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