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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
Programs
Program
Writer
Best
Writing
Thing
Rationalized
Apprenticeship

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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.
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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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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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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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I am not a ventriloquist.
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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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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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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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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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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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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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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
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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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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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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
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The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
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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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