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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
Thing
Rationalized
Apprenticeship
Programs
Program
Writer
Best
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 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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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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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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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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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
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I am not a ventriloquist.
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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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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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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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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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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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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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