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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
Work
Nobody
Dad
Something
Days
Hour
Years
Guy
Road
Really
Hours
Rock
Way
Read
Worked
Scrap
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Admired
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More quotes by 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?
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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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.
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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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Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
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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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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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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.
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Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.
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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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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
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I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.
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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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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
Richard Russo
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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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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.
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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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
Richard Russo
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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
Richard Russo
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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
Richard Russo