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 BanksI 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 BanksWhat 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 BanksJohn 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 BanksStorytelling 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 BanksThrough 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 BanksWe 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 BanksWe know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.
Russell BanksDriving 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.
Russell BanksIf you are born black, it is better to be born now than in any other time in United States history. My grandson is black. His life is a different life than if he had been born when I was born.
Russell BanksBoys 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 BanksI 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.
Russell BanksWe 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.
Russell BanksBut 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 BanksFirst 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 BanksOne 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.
Russell BanksI 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 BanksThere is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
Russell BanksPublic 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 BanksWhat 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.
Russell BanksThe 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.
Russell BanksChoose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.
Russell BanksAnd there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell BanksIf 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 BanksYou 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.
Russell BanksIt 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.
Russell BanksThe best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
Russell BanksOne 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 BanksAlthough I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
Russell BanksA couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Russell BanksLists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Russell BanksThe 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 BanksThey 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.
Russell Banks