We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

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• John Banville:

  Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another b

• John Banville:

  I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get

• John Banville:

  It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literatu

• John Banville:

  We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.

• John Banville:

  Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.

• John Banville:

  When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the

• John Banville:

  I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogan

• John Banville:

  Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, i

• John Banville:

  I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirtie

• John Banville:

  I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, b