Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Motivational
Worth
Books
Inspirational
Tell
Reread
Book
Relative
Finish
Lists

More quotes by Russell Banks

Image
Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
Russell Banks
Image
It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Russell Banks
Image
Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
Russell Banks
Image
Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
Russell Banks
Image
The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
Russell Banks
Image
Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.
Russell Banks
Image
A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Russell Banks
Image
Nobody does anything for one reason.
Russell Banks
Image
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.
Russell Banks
Image
Driving home, it's all I can do to keep from crying. Time's come, time's gone, time's never returning, I say to myself. What's here in front of me is all I've got, I decide, and as I drive my car through the blowing snow it doesn't seem like much, except for the kindness that I've just exchanged with an old lady, so I concentrate on that.
Russell Banks
Image
I am not a ventriloquist.
Russell Banks
Image
Motivations are too tangled and complex.
Russell Banks
Image
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.
Russell Banks
Image
Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.
Russell Banks
Image
I'm seventy-six now. I'm at a stage in my life where I feel a lot of affection and regard for women, and I felt the need to make this clear in some way. I don't know how they'll feel when they read it, but I feel okay about it.
Russell Banks
Image
One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
Russell Banks
Image
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
Image
It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Russell Banks
Image
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.
Russell Banks
Image
There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
Russell Banks