Russell Banks Quotes
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Much more than memoir; it's history.
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Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
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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.
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But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.
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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.
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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.
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Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
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And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
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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.
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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.
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I am not a ventriloquist.
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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.
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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.
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The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in the U.S. because of how we want to think about our veterans. There's the sense that we want to think of our veterans as - if they're damaged, damaged by something glamorous, like a firefight.
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Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
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Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
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Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.