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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
Sometimes
Nation
Even
Memories
Think
Imagination
Elegiac
Thinking
Books
Odes
Nations
Anymore
Sense
Memory
May
Except
Book
Exist

More quotes by 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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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
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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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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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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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I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.
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 can be glib and truthful all at once.
Richard Russo
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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.
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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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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... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
Richard Russo
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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
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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People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
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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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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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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