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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
Everybody
Sure
Simple
Words
World
Refused
Friend
Needed

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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
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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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... 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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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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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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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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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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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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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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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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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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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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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 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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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
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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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America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
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