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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
Motivations
Tangled
Complexes
Complex
Motivation

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.
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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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
Russell Banks
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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.
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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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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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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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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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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
Russell Banks
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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
Russell Banks
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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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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
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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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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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.
Russell Banks
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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
Russell Banks