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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Theme
Ultimately
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More quotes by Richard Russo

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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.
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 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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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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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?
Richard Russo
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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.
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
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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
Richard Russo
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Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.
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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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
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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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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 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
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People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
Richard Russo
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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.
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
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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
Richard Russo
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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
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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
Richard Russo