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Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Movies
Efficiently
Present
Scenes
Together
Novels
Time
Handle
Necessarily
Aren
Scene
Novel
Stringing

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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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Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
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I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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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.
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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
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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.
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Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.
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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.
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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.
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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
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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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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.
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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.
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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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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.
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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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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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