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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Habit
Mistake
Sometimes
People
Loyal

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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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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
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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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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.
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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
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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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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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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.
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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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I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
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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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... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
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