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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Always
Smarter
Unconscious
Intelligence
Wonderful

More quotes by Russell Banks

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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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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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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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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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The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
Russell Banks
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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
Russell Banks
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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
Russell Banks
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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
Russell Banks
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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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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Russell Banks
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I am not a ventriloquist.
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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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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.
Russell Banks
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
Russell Banks