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For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Able
Average
Work
Writers
Writer
Accountant
Since
Accountants
Almost
Dentist
Anyone
Chooses
Learn
Equivalent
Living
Earned

More quotes by Russell Banks

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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, 'I hope that you will love me for no good reason.' But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another, to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers, especially to strangers who have neither good, nor bad reasons to love us.
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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.
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Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.
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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
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Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.
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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.
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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in the U.S. because of how we want to think about our veterans. There's the sense that we want to think of our veterans as - if they're damaged, damaged by something glamorous, like a firefight.
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I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
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I am not a ventriloquist.
Russell Banks
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Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
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Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Russell Banks
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One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.
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