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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: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Essentials
Dublin
Climate
Manhattan
Places
Italy
Light
Settled
Seems
Greatly
Live
Irish
Writing
France
Like
Essential
Congenial

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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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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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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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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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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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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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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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