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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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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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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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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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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
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I am not a ventriloquist.
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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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Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
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The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
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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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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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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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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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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.
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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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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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Russell Banks