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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
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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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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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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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 am the worst judge of my books.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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