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Motivations are too tangled and complex.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Motivation
Motivations
Tangled
Complexes
Complex

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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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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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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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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
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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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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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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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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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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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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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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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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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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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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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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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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