Russell Banks Quotes

Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

Oh, I think every author is inspired by all of the books that she reads.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books.

My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

I started to read at a very early age, and I just thought that books and reading were really the most wonderful thing that life had to offer. I think I wrote my very first piece of fiction at the age of 12, but then I didn't write any more for quite a long time.

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'

I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.

I really like the short stories that Melissa Bank writes. I think she's sort of channeling the female version of J.D. Salinger in more recent days.

Sloane Crosley and David Sedaris are two of my favorite writers; they're the kind of writers who make you feel like, 'I can do this. I want to do this.'