Russell Banks Quotes

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

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

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.

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and when they hunt...they work together.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

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.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Nobody does anything for one reason.

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

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

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.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

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

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

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

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.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.

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.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

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.

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.

One hates a person for the same reason one loves him

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

If you are born black, it is better to be born now than in any other time in United States history. My grandson is black. His life is a different life than if he had been born when I was born.

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

I am not a ventriloquist.

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

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

Much more than memoir; it's history.

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.

There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.

We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.

He said, "Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie.

When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.