Richard Russo Quotes

I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

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.

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.

People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

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.

To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.

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.

Cary Grant never won an Oscar, primarily, I suspect, because he made everything look so effortless. Why reward someone for having fun, for being charming?

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.

Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?

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

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.

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.

To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.

People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.

Stories worked much the same way . . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.

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.

"If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity." Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad."

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

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

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

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?

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.

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.