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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Years
Guy
Road
Really
Hours
Rock
Way
Read
Worked
Scrap
Would
Body
Guys
Admired
Book
Rocks
Crew
Hard
Lived
Iron
Work
Nobody
Dad
Something
Days
Hour

More quotes by Richard Russo

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Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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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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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.
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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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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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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
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I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
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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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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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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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He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
Richard Russo
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If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
Richard Russo
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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
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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America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
Richard Russo