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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
Made
Strange
Really
Decision
Concluded
Things
Middle
Discovers
Men
Age
Drift
Like
Friends
Odd
Simple
Neglect
Making
Allowing
Away
Decisions

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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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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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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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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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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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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
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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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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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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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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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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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I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.
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To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.
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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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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
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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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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
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