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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Writing
Much
Nearly
Never
Seem
Think
Written
Thinking
Class
People
Write
Place
Seems

More quotes by Richard Russo

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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
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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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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I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
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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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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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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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
Richard Russo
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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 it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.
Richard Russo
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If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
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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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
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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.
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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It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.
Richard Russo
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... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
Richard Russo