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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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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Best
Writing
Thing
Rationalized
Apprenticeship
Programs
Program
Writer

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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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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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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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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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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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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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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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
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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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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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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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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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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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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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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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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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