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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Wants
Persons
Person
Hard
Life

More quotes by Russell Banks

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I am not a ventriloquist.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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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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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.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
Russell Banks
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Nobody does anything for one reason.
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks
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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
Russell Banks
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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell Banks
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
Russell Banks
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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
Russell Banks
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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
Russell Banks
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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.
Russell Banks