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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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"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."
"There is a difference between talented people and gifted people.Talented people are good AT something, Gifted people ARE that something."
"You need to find your gift, something you are doing better than others."
"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions."
"With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy."
"If you have the ability to see the things behind the scenes, then you have the greatest talent one can ever have because there is almost always something else behind the things!"
Explore more quotes by Russell Banks
"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."
"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."
"A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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