"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"
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Banks is doing two things at once: paying a debt of craft and staking a claim about cultural value. He frames writing not as a lightning-bolt talent but as a downstream effect of reading, a lineage you can enter if you’re willing to apprentice yourself to sentences. The phrase "But really" has a lightly corrective edge, as if he’s brushing aside romantic myths about inspiration to point at something more workmanlike: a reader becomes a writer by absorption, by imitation, by being taught what to notice.
Twain is the strategic citation. Banks isn’t invoking "the classics" to sound tasteful; he’s naming a specifically American permission slip. Twain made vernacular speech, small-town routines, hustles, embarrassments, and moral compromises feel like legitimate subject matter. Banks’ emphasis on "ordinary lives of ordinary people" isn’t modesty, it’s an argument against the prestige economy that treats certain experiences as inherently literary and others as mere reportage. His doubling of "ordinary" is the point: not exceptional people with hidden genius, not the poor as exotic spectacle, just the daily grain of being alive.
The subtext is class and democracy. Banks, often read as a chronicler of working- and middle-class struggle, is aligning himself with a tradition that makes art out of lives the culture routinely overlooks. "High art" lands with a quiet provocation: if the everyday can be elevated, then the gatekeeping around what counts as serious literature is revealed as taste posing as truth.
Twain is the strategic citation. Banks isn’t invoking "the classics" to sound tasteful; he’s naming a specifically American permission slip. Twain made vernacular speech, small-town routines, hustles, embarrassments, and moral compromises feel like legitimate subject matter. Banks’ emphasis on "ordinary lives of ordinary people" isn’t modesty, it’s an argument against the prestige economy that treats certain experiences as inherently literary and others as mere reportage. His doubling of "ordinary" is the point: not exceptional people with hidden genius, not the poor as exotic spectacle, just the daily grain of being alive.
The subtext is class and democracy. Banks, often read as a chronicler of working- and middle-class struggle, is aligning himself with a tradition that makes art out of lives the culture routinely overlooks. "High art" lands with a quiet provocation: if the everyday can be elevated, then the gatekeeping around what counts as serious literature is revealed as taste posing as truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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