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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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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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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
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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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One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
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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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Motivations are too tangled and complex.
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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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The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
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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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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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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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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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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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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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'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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I am not a ventriloquist.
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