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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
Seems
Writing
Much
Nearly
Never
Seem
Think
Written
Thinking
Class
People
Write
Place

More quotes by 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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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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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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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
Richard Russo
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I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.
Richard Russo
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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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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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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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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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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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I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.
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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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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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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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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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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.
Richard Russo
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People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
Richard Russo
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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
Richard Russo