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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?

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Ducks
Professor
Professors
English
Kill
Goose
Hold
Geese
Example
Duck
Would
Threaten

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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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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.
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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.
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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.
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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.
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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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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?
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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
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One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.
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If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
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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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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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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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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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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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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, 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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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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