Russell Banks Quotations

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.

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

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.

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.

So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.

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.

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.

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

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to 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.

I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

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.

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.

I taught at Princeton and it was undergraduate and I much prefer teaching undergraduates to graduate students in writing programs.

I think probably in the earlier parts of my career I was influenced by writers such as Hawthorne and Melville - the American classics.

That was the funny part of the reading.

The prizes have some credibility, of course. And they do good work for the writer and for the publisher, by winnowing one book out of the pack.

So far I've been very lucky in that stories have come to me like a thunderstorm, unexpected, full of darkness and energy demanding all my attention.

And of course, it's hard to produce a work at the end of those years of solitude, which may or may not be understood or appreciated.

All you could do was flip switches and make lights blink.

Much more than memoir; it's history.

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

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

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

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.

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

They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on this planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded.

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

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.

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.

It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.

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.

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

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

No, because I am not a ventriloquist.

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.

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.

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

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

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

One hates a person for the same reason one loves him

Nobody does anything for one reason.

One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another - to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers... no matter who we are to one another and who we are not.

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.

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

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.