Russell Banks
Russell Banks
Russell Banksis an American writer of fiction and poetry. As a novelist, Banks is best known for his "detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters". His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, and often reflect "moral themes and personal relationships"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 March 1940
CountryUnited States of America
writing intelligent honest
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.
clever reading writing
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
writing paint draws
Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
book writing perfect
The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.
writing program apprenticeship
The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
writing people care
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
writing discipline attention
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.
art reading writing
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.
american-author book good prizes work writer
The prizes have some credibility, of course. And they do good work for the writer and for the publisher, by winnowing one book out of the pack.
funny
That was the funny part of the reading.
american-author career earlier influenced parts writers
I think probably in the earlier parts of my career I was influenced by writers such as Hawthorne and Melville - the American classics.
american-author grows invented
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.
dividing issues
So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.
american-author graduate prefer princeton students taught teaching
I taught at Princeton and it was undergraduate and I much prefer teaching undergraduates to graduate students in writing programs.