Quote

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

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Like
Entire
Boys
Least
Talk
Lives
Kids
Anyhow
Always
Pretend
Men
Grown

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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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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.
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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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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.
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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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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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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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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.
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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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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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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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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.
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I am not a ventriloquist.
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The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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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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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
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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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