Quotes by Russell Banks

About Russell Banks:

Russell Banks is an American writer of fiction and poetry. As a novelist, Banks is best known for his "detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters". His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, and often reflect "moral themes and personal relationships".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Russell Banks

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, ...

Russell Banks

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

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 anythi...

Russell Banks

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.

Russell Banks

Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.

Russell Banks

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

Russell Banks

When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.

Russell Banks

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

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

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

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

Nobody does anything for one reason.

Russell Banks

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

Russell Banks

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

Russell Banks

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

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameRussell Banks
  • DescriptionAmerican author
  • BornMarch 28, 1940
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionScreenwriter; Author; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship