Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone? Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone. - John Banville

I like to hide in Ireland, but I like to think of myself as an internal exile.

I don't know anything about myself. Put it this way, there is no self. I believe that we're a compendium of personalities. We're whoever we meet. We go through the day being who we think we should be and who we think we'd like to be.

I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really so occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant.