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"Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves."
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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
Explore more quotes by Russell Banks
"A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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