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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
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Ends
Certainly
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Usually
Percolate
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More quotes by 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.
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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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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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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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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.
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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
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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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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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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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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
Richard Russo