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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: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Look
Individuals
Looks
Identity
Begin
Personal
Resides
Imagine
Dont
Individual
Individuality
Difficult
Absolutes
Find
Absolute

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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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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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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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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 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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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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