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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
People
Desire
Marble
Place
Passage
Become
Passages
Whole
Desires
Plausibility
Even
Logic
Entrenched
Heart
Wide
Yearn
Time
Eternal
Defiance
World
Impossible
Polished

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
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Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
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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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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
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