Zitat des Tages von Russell Banks:
A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.
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.
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Nobody does anything for one reason.
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.
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.
It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
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.
The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.
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.
For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.
But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.
Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
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.
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.
Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
