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Nobody does anything for one reason.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Doe
Anything
Reason
Nobody

More quotes by Russell Banks

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The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
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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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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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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.
Russell Banks
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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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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.
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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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.
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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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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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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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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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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
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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.
Russell Banks
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I am not a ventriloquist.
Russell Banks
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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
Russell Banks