"I think probably in the earlier parts of my career I was influenced by writers such as Hawthorne and Melville - the American classics."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: Russell Banks

• "A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the ..."
• "Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my ..."
• "And of course, it's hard to produce a work at the end of those years ..."
• "And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to ..."
• "And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And ..."
• "And we have gone through something, and we are still going through it, that I ..."
• "But it seems to me at my age that the dead are very much with ..."
• "But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down. "
• "But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the ..."
• "But then in my 40s and the 1980s, I became more influenced by the naturalists ..."
• "By the time I was in my early twenties I had abandoned painting and drawing ..."
• "Certain stakes are higher than they used to be, and they are measured by celebrity. "
• "Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely. "
• "First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They ..."
• "For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are ..."
• "HBO is doing Cloudsplitter - a major deal: Martin Scorsese and me producing it and ..."
• "I am old enough now - I used to publish books and nobody went on ..."
• "I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that ..."
• "I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows ..."
• "I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading ..."
• "I taught at Princeton and it was undergraduate and I much prefer teaching undergraduates to ..."

• "If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you ..."
• "In several ways... first because, as a fan of the films of Atom Egoyan, I ..."
• "It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check. "
• "It's so commodified a world we live in that you end up a huckster, no ..."
• "John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political ..."
• "Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than ..."
• "Motivations are too tangled and complex. "
• "My books are taught a lot now. "
• "My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history. "
• "No, because I am not a ventriloquist. "
• "Nobody does anything for one reason. "
• "One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all ..."
• "So far I've been very lucky in that stories have come to me like a ..."
• "So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing ..."
• "Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community ..."
• "The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house ..."
• "The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer. "
• "The prizes have some credibility, of course. And they do good work for the writer ..."
• "The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War. "
• "There are people who want to be writers because they think writers are celebrated people ..."

• "This generation, this baby-boomer generation that came to maturity or immaturity, depending on your point ..."
• "Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest ..."
• "We went to church on Sunday and we went to Sunday school. But there was ..."
• "What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get ..."