Russell Banks Quotes
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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I am aware of the changes, but in no sense am I believer that we live in a post-racial society. That's a description of our inheritance and that is theirs, which is inescapable. It is doesn't matter if you are from New England or Mississippi. You're an American. It doesn't matter if you are white, black, brown, or Asian. It is part of American society. You'd have to be blind, deaf, or dumb not to know it. The emphasis on color or the fear of it, is all part of the same dark flower. I am trying to point to that and to bring it all the way back from Senegal.
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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.
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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, especially to strangers who have neither good, nor bad reasons to love us.
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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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I'm seventy-six now. I'm at a stage in my life where I feel a lot of affection and regard for women, and I felt the need to make this clear in some way. I don't know how they'll feel when they read it, but I feel okay about it.
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You go out into the world, you read everything you can read, you imitate the things you love, and you learn how hard it is to do. Eventually, you learn your own vision of the world, you learn your own voice and how to hear it, and you learn to write your own work. Writers today have as many opportunities as my generation did, but they don't see the examples as clearly as we did.
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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.
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A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
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We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.
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We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.
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Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
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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.
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Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.
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If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter.
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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
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Nobody does anything for one reason.
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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.
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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.