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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
World
Impossible
Polished
People
Desire
Marble
Place
Passage
Become
Passages
Whole
Desires
Plausibility
Even
Logic
Entrenched
Heart
Wide
Yearn
Time
Eternal
Defiance

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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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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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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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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.
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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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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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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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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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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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
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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.
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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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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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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.
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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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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.
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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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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
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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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