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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
Real
View
Braid
Really
Views
Braids
Things
Simple
Complexes
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Complex
Easy
Avoid
Shows
Reasons
Reason
Motivation
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Reductionist

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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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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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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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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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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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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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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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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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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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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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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.
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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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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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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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.
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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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