Richard Russo Quotes (47 Quotes)

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

But of course everything had conspired to spoil her entrance, which only went to prove what Janine already knew: that no matter how well you planned something, God always planned better. If He was feeling stingy that day and didn't want you to have some little thing you had your heart set on, then you weren't going to get it and that was all there was to it.

In this instance, she understood completely what the endorsement of a fool was worth.

Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque.

Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.

She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.

The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.

The sad, fucking truth was that no matter who you are, you never, ever, get your fill.

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I'm not simply taking dictation.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book.

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.

What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation.

I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.

I can be glib and truthful all at once.

By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

I loved the idea of having Paul Newman here, and that wonderful cast. I was particularly glad to see . . . that army of people, many of them local, who were set into motion by that film.

HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.

It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.