Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.
Richard Russo
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Write
Sets
Stories
Fronts
America
Front
Writing
Sitting
People
Television
Interesting
American
Ignoring
Culture
Unfortunately
More quotes by Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
Richard Russo
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
I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
Richard Russo
Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.
Richard Russo
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
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.
Richard Russo
To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
Richard Russo
I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
Richard Russo
...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
Richard Russo
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
Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
Richard Russo
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
Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
Richard Russo
He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
Richard Russo
They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
Richard Russo
There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
Richard Russo
In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
Richard Russo
