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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.

Russell Banks

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Russell Banks
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Describe
Sin
Prohibitions
Prohibition
Sins

More quotes by 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.
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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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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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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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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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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
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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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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.
Russell Banks
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I am not a ventriloquist.
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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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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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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.
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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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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
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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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell Banks
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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.
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 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.
Russell Banks