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

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Thinking
Held
Short
Almost
Story
Stories
Mind
Something
Think
Envisioned

More quotes by Richard Russo

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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.
Richard Russo
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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
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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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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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
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To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.
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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Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.
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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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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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 road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
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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Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.
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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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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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.
Richard Russo