Russell Banks

Found 21 thoughts of Russell Banks

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Russell Banks

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

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

Russell Banks

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

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.

Russell Banks

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

Russell Banks

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

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

Nobody does anything for one reason.

Russell Banks

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.

Russell Banks

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

Russell Banks

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

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

Russell Banks

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

Russell Banks

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

Russell Banks

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.

Russell Banks

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

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

Russell Banks

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

Russell Banks

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

Russell Banks

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.

Russell Banks