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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.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Things
Simple
Complexes
Show
Complex
Easy
Avoid
Shows
Reasons
Reason
Motivation
Book
Tried
Reductionist
Real
View
Braid
Really
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Braids

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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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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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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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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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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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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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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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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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I am not a ventriloquist.
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
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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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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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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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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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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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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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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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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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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