Russell Banks

“Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.”

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

“So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.”

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

“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.”

“My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.”

“Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.”

“Nobody does anything for one reason.”

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

“Motivations are too tangled and complex.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.”

“The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.”

“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.”

“A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it's this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it's cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It's the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.”

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

“And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.”

“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.”

“But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.”