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

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• 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

• John Banville:

  I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in

• John Banville:

  I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great le

• John Banville:

  With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's

• John Banville:

  With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.