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What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Refused
Friend
Needed
Everybody
Sure
Simple
Words
World

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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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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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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.
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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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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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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 was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
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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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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 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.
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People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
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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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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
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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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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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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
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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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Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
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