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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Beginning
Nearer
Ends
Note
Stories
False
Part
Errors
Much
Notes
Way
Foundation
Worked
Early
Costly

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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
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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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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.
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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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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
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Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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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.
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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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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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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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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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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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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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He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
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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.
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Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
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