Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Would
Body
Guys
Admired
Book
Rocks
Crew
Hard
Lived
Iron

More quotes by Richard Russo

Image
There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
Richard Russo
Image
Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
Richard Russo
Image
Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
Richard Russo
Image
Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
Richard Russo
Image
I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
Richard Russo
Image
I can be glib and truthful all at once.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
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