Richard Russo quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Richard Russo

Richard Russo Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Richard Russo on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

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

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.

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

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

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.

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

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,

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

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me.

There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.

Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully

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

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

Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.

Probably horse doo had a name in french also, but that didn't mean god intended for you to eat it.

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.

He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.

- You get more misanthropic every day.
- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.

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

Perfect silence. This in response to Sully's key being turned in the ignition of the pickup.

She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.

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

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

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?

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

Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?

Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you?
Sully: Not often. Now and then.

Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.

So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.

Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time?

By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference.

Begin laughing too, though they have no idea why. Which

Straight Man: But my daughter belongs to a talk show generation that seems to be losing the ability to discriminate between public and private woes.

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

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

I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.

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

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

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.

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

The more you had, it seemed to me, the larger your border that needed defending.

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

She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line.

You've become a clever man.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

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.

ragged piece of thin glass jutted out of the socket, all that was left of the

Max would conclude, that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money.

Since turning in his resignation, he'd been wondering what he might do next. Suddenly his path seemed clear. He would become an alcoholic. He

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

What an absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept.

Come sit on my lap. I want to hear all about your sexual harassment lunch.
-Hank to his secretary, Rachel

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

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

We wear the chains we forge in life,

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

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

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.

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

The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness.

Aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

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

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

Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing.

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

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

If making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another.

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.

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?

Amazing, isn't it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?" In

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

You want a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?" Sully offered. "You don't have a stick," Will pointed out.

My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils.

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

old textile mill, which was in the process of being

Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.

Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?

I can be glib and truthful all at once.

(God) seemed to know everything that was in her heart and to understand that nothing dwelt there that wasn't absolutely necessary to her survival.

No. Simplicity and justice require that thought and deed not be carelessly elided.

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

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

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

Let us not forget Colby and the liberating effects of higher education. Though it doesn't liberate everyone, does it?

people cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom. It

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

... a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect.

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.

witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility.

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

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

Like I said, what makes people tick isn't neccessarily what makes them good. Fast-forward,