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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
Complexes
Complex
Motivation
Motivations
Tangled

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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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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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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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I am not a ventriloquist.
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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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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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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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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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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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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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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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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.
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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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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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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
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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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