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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Book
Urges
Self
Precisely
Take
Destructive
Thing
Delight
Characters
Books
Wrong
Perverse
Character
Urge

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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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It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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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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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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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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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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America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
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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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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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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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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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