Life & Wisdom Quote by Russell Banks

There is a quiet audacity in the idea of "inventing myself as a listener": it treats attention not as a passive virtue but as an act of authorship. Banks, a novelist with a lifelong interest in class, intimacy, and the stories people use to survive, frames listening as something built, not bestowed. The sentence starts by rejecting "self-conscious or artificial" work, then immediately admits the opposite: the relationship (to "her voice", to a subject, to a character) requires construction. That friction is the point.

The subtext is that artlessness is often a performance. Banks is wary of sounding like a writer congratulating himself for sensitivity, yet he can’t avoid the fact that sensitivity here is engineered. "Grows out of" is craft language pretending to be organic; "invented" is craft language dropping the pretense. What makes the line work is its double-bind honesty: he wants authenticity, but he knows authenticity is produced through choices, posture, and discipline.

Contextually, Banks is describing a creative and ethical stance that shows up across his fiction: the writer as someone who must make room for other lives without ventriloquizing them. "Her voice" suggests a specific woman, but it also gestures at the perennial problem of representation: to hear someone clearly, you may need to change who you are. Listening becomes self-revision, and self-revision becomes the condition for any voice to arrive on the page without being flattened into the author's ego.