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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Class
American
Work
Life
Enduring
Theme
Endure
Effects
Probably

More quotes by 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.
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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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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?
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Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.
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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.
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I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
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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.
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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
Richard Russo
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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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.
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People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
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