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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Structure
Hope
Always
Things
Reveal

More quotes by Richard Russo

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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.
Richard Russo
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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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
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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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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.
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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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
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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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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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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.
Richard Russo
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I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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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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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After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.
Richard Russo