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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.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Thinking
Books
Odes
Nations
Anymore
Sense
Memory
May
Except
Book
Exist
Sometimes
Nation
Even
Memories
Think
Imagination
Elegiac

More quotes by Richard Russo

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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.
Richard Russo
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What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?
Richard Russo
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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
Richard Russo
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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
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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 can be glib and truthful all at once.
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've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.
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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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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.
Richard Russo
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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
Richard Russo
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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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He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
Richard Russo
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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
Richard Russo
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Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.
Richard Russo
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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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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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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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