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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
Characters
Books
Wrong
Perverse
Character
Urge
Book
Urges
Self
Precisely
Take
Destructive
Thing
Delight

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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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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 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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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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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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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
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Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.
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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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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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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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