Richard Russo Quotes

94 quotes in 1365 categories

• Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
• That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing…
• Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
• Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
• Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
• My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that…
• 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…
• You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.
• Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because…
• Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
• 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…
• Ultimately, your #‎ theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
• People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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