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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
World
Sins
Originals
Original
None
Sin
Many
Great

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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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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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I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.
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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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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
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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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America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
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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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
Richard Russo
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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.
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
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo