Quote

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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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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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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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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