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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.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Things
Middle
Discovers
Men
Age
Drift
Like
Friends
Odd
Simple
Neglect
Making
Allowing
Away
Decisions
Made
Strange
Really
Decision
Concluded

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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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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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Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
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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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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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If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
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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'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
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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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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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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.
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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
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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.
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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
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The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.
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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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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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