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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
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Johnstown
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More quotes by Richard Russo

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When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
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Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
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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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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.
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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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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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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.
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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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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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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.
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Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.
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It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.
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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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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
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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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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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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