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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.

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
Light
Settled
Seems
Greatly
Live
Irish
Writing
France
Like
Essential
Congenial
Essentials
Dublin
Climate
Manhattan
Places
Italy

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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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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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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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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 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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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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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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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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