Irish - Novelist | December 8, 1945 -
We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.
John Banville
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With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.
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I don't 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, it's very difficult to find.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.
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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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It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
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Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.
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When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.
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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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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 read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
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