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.
Russell Banks

Nobody does anything for one reason.
Russell Banks

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell Banks

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.
Russell Banks

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.
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.
Russell Banks

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.
Russell Banks

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.
Russell Banks