Quote

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

Russell Banks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Russell Banks

Image
Nobody does anything for one reason.
Russell Banks
Image
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
Image
The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
Russell Banks
Image
The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
Russell Banks
Image
Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
Russell Banks
Image
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell Banks
Image
It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Russell Banks
Image
It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Russell Banks
Image
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.
Russell Banks
Image
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
Image
A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Russell Banks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
Russell Banks
Image
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
Image
Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
Russell Banks