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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.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Possibility
Wasn
Choices
Wrong
Right
Thing
Choice

More quotes by Richard Russo

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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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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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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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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.
Richard Russo
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By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.
Richard Russo
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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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I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
Richard Russo
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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
Richard Russo
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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
Richard Russo
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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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?
Richard Russo
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... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
Richard Russo
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If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
Richard Russo