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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Total
Solitude
Spend
Working
Reality
Hard
Years
Check
Time
Checks

More quotes by Russell Banks

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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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I am not a ventriloquist.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
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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 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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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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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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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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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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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
Russell Banks
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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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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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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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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