Russell Banks Quotes

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Books

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Finding, Older

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cold War, Abandoned, Journalist

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

  Russell Banks

  Tags in Programs, Apprenticeship, Rationalized

• 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

• 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

  Tags in Rewarded, Essential, Embrace, Storytelling

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

  Russell Banks

  Tags in Dividing, Divided, Cultural

• 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

• Nobody does anything for one reason.

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Nobody

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

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Allegiance, Storytelling, Journalist

• Motivations are too tangled and complex.

  Russell Banks

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Complex, Motivations, 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

• 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

  Tags in Civil, University, Swam, Brown, Chapel

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

  Russell Banks

  Tags in Total, Spend, Solitude

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

• Eileen Favorite
• Jack T. Chick
• Sōseki Natsume
• Mary Gordon
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• Mary Johnston
• Peter Falk
• Samuel Richardson
• Scott Turow
• Mary MacLane

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 15th April

Births

• 1889 - A. Philip Randolph
• 1933 - Roy Linwood Clark
• 1971 - Lara St. John
• 1920 - Richard von Weizsacker
• 1894 - Nikita Khrushchev

Deaths

• 1840 - Thomas Drummond
• 1984 - Tommy Cooper
• 1659 - Simon Dach
• 1888 - Matthew Arnold
• 1912 - William Thomas Stead