Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Richard Russo

Image
I can be glib and truthful all at once.
Richard Russo
Image
A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
Richard Russo
Image
Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
Richard Russo
Image
I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.
Richard Russo
Image
Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
Richard Russo
Image
Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
Richard Russo
Image
...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
Richard Russo
Image
I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
Richard Russo
Image
It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.
Richard Russo
Image
If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
Richard Russo