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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.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
World
Frequently
Humor
Risk
Simply
Disingenuous
Writing
Reporting
Really
Appearing
Think
Hilarious
Thinking
Observe

More quotes by Richard Russo

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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.
Richard Russo
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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
Richard Russo
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I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
Richard Russo
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
Richard Russo
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I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
Richard Russo
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Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.
Richard Russo
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I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
Richard Russo
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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
Richard Russo
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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
Richard Russo
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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
Richard Russo
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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo