Top 85 Russell Banks Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter.
Russell Banks
#3. Believes in God the way he believes in politicians-he knows He exists but doesn't count on Him for anything.
Russell Banks
#6. my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves
Russell Banks
#7. We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.
Russell Banks
#8. I've got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It's just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you're a parasite of sorts.
Russell Banks
#9. It's a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I'm in charge here.
Russell Banks
#10. He can't quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man's deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work.
Russell Banks
#11. 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
#12. A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Russell Banks
#13. it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially from the sickness of racialism.
Russell Banks
#14. But when you're a kid it's like you're wearing these binoculars strapped to your eyes and you can't see anything except what's in the dead center of the lenses
Russell Banks
#15. From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.
Russell Banks
#16. Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.
Russell Banks
#17. It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Russell Banks
#18. The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
Russell Banks
#19. In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.
Russell Banks
#20. It's a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand.
Russell Banks
#21. And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell Banks
#22. There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It's always smarter than we are.
Russell Banks
#23. So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.
Russell Banks
#24. 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.
Russell Banks
#25. Thus, until we have truly become a democracy, every American, white as much as black, red, or yellow, lives not in his skin but on it. If one person is called "colored", let all be colored.
Russell Banks
#26. Angry? Yes, I'm angry: I'd be a lousy lawyer if I weren't.
Russell Banks
#27. Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.
Russell Banks
#28. The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.
Russell Banks
#29. [ ... ] I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death.
Russell Banks
#30. 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
#31. It's like a crime is an act that when you've committed one the act is over and you haven't changed inside. But when you commit a sin it's like you create a condition that you have to live in.
Russell Banks
#32. I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred.
Russell Banks
#33. I was afraid of the consequences of my acts in the right way, beyond guilt, but it was too late. I'd already become the person I should have been afraid of becoming.
Russell Banks
#34. But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.
Russell Banks
#35. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.
Russell Banks
#36. Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.
Russell Banks
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.
Russell Banks
#40. 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
#41. Fixing motives is like fixing blame-the further away from the act you get, the harder it is to single out one thing as having caused it.
Russell Banks
#42. My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.
Russell Banks
#43. Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children we might have never discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible.
Russell Banks
#44. Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.
Russell Banks
#45. 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
#46. Anyone can be a cause of his or her own destruction, but no one can claim individual responsibility for having created a great good.
Russell Banks
#47. Our sins describe us, and our prohibitions describe our sins.
Russell Banks
#48. Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.
Russell Banks
#49. The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
Russell Banks
#50. But I understood Bear Otto's desire to become a noble man, a man like Billy Ansel, and I respected that, naturally. I just wished the boy had more ways of imagining the thing than by becoming a good soldier. But that's boys, I guess.
Russell Banks
#51. He said, Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie.
Russell Banks
#55. Listen, identify withe the victims and you become one yourself. Victims make lousy litigators.
Russell Banks
#56. It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Russell Banks
#57. Because it's anger that drives us and delivers us. It's not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.
Russell Banks
#58. It's coming to seem the only way to avoid hurting other people, which in his experience is what gives them power over you.
Russell Banks
#59. Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
Russell Banks
#60. Obviously, you can't control everything, but you are obliged to take care of the few things you can. I'm an optimist, basically, who acts like a pessimist. On principle. Just in case.
Russell Banks
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.
Russell Banks
#67. All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs.
Russell Banks
#68. I'm the kind of person who always follows the manual. No shortcuts.
Russell Banks
#69. Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
Russell Banks
#70. Lists of books we re-read and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves
Russell Banks
#71. 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
#72. And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
Russell Banks
#74. Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.
Russell Banks
#75. Actually I dont know if it ever works out unless you are standing in the middle of the street and dont see the ten-ton truck coming and this good guy pushes you out of the way and says its for your own good.
Russell Banks
#76. When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you'll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you'll know.
Russell Banks
#77. For instance, a man generally doesn't even know how small a woman is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child's and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem.
Russell Banks
#78. 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.
Russell Banks
#79. 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.
Russell Banks
#80. The only way I could go on living was to believe I was not living.
Russell Banks
#82. 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
#83. By this evening," he declared, "we will all know who we are and what we're doing here!
Russell Banks
#84. One hates a person for the same reason one loves him
Russell Banks
#85. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
