Russell Banks Quotes

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Books

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hanging, Journalist, Writing

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Writer

• 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.

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Twain, Journalist, Classic

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Clever

  Tags in Imitate, Essentially, Monkey, Desire

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Complex, Braid, Avoid, View, Motivation

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Boy, Late, Serious, Journalist, Literature

• 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.

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Self-Conscious, Invented, Journalist, Listener

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Actively, Hunt, Seek, Journalist

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Shaped, Paint, Journalist

• Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Endangered, Severely, Journalist

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Educated, Rarely, Privileged, Run, Journalist

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Almost, Accountant, Earned, Journalist

• 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.

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Weekend, Change, Changed, Book, Journalist

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Finish, Reread, Journalist

• Motivations are too tangled and complex.

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Complex, Motivations, Journalist

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cold War, Abandoned, Journalist

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Allegiance, Storytelling, Journalist

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Imaginative, Intelligent

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Upstate, Faded, Buried, Turned, House

Russell Banks (28)

Birth:	28th March, 1940
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Writer

About

Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.He lives in upstate New York, and has been named a New York State Author. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland.

Related Authors

• Ilya Ehrenburg
• Ernest Partridge
• Sarah Mlynowski
• Bernard Avishai
• Luis Fernando Verissimo
• William Chappell
• Lynette Mather
• Justin Kaplan
• Richard Yates
• William Butler

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 3rd April

Births

• 1943 - Richard Manuel
• 1942 - Wayne Newton
• 1942 - Marsha Mason
• 1814 - Lorenzo Snow
• 1949 - Lyle Alzado

Deaths

• 1990 - Sarah Vaughan
• 1933 - Wilson Mizner
• 2000 - Terence McKenna
• 1974 - Marston Bates
• 1988 - Milton Caniff