Russell Banks Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Motivation, Real, Book

  76 Copy quote

• 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

  Affection, Okay

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Much more than memoir; it's history.

  Russell Banks

  Memoir

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• I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

  Russell Banks

  Reading, Artist, Boys

  7 Copy quote

• Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

  Russell Banks

  Agents, Lawyer, Dentist

  4 Copy quote

• It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

  Russell Banks

  Reality, Years, Solitude

  7 Copy quote

• When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who's in charge. If the young man's in charge or won't let the old man take over, the young man's brute strength becomes destructive and inefficient, and the old man's intelligence, out of frustration, grows cruel and inefficient. Sometimes the old man forgets that he is old and tries to compete with the young man's strength, and then it's a sad sight. Or the young man forgets that he is young and argues with the old man about how to do the work, and that's a sad sight, too.

  Russell Banks

  Frustration, Men, Sight

  Russell Banks (1986). “Trailerpark”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Average, Able, Dentist

  9 Copy quote

• And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

  Russell Banks

  Writing, People, Care

  Interview with Robert I. Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 18, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Intelligent, Honest

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Kids, Boys, Men

  Russell Banks (2011). “Lost Memory of Skin”, p.34, Profile Books

  4 Copy quote

• If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter.

  Russell Banks

  Discipline, Attention, Pals

  Interview with Robert I. Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 18, 2005.

  7 Copy quote

• What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older.

  Russell Banks

  Want, Good Things, Very Good

  Interview with Robert I. Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 18, 2005.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Russell Banks

  Sin, Prohibition

  Russell Banks (1986). “Success stories”, Harpercollins

  4 Copy quote

• And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

  Russell Banks

  Clever, Reading, Writing

  7 Copy quote

• The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

  Russell Banks

  New York, House, John Brown

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  Loyalty, People, Kicks

  12 Copy quote

• A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

  Russell Banks

  Couple, Years, Nyu

  Interview with Robert I. Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 18, 2005.

  56 Copy quote

• But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

  Russell Banks

  Hunting, Hands, Stories

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Fire, Air, Water

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• I am not a ventriloquist.

  Russell Banks

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 18, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Men, White

  Interview with Robert I. Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 18, 2005.

  6 Copy quote

• John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

  Russell Banks

  War, Rights, Political

  52 Copy quote

• Motivations are too tangled and complex.

  Russell Banks

  Motivation, Tangled, Complexes

  Interview with Robert I. Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. January 18, 2005.

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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

  Want, Persons, Knows

  Russell Banks (1986). “Trailerpark”

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