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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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I am not a ventriloquist.
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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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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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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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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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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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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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The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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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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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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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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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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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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