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Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Time
Almost
Understanding
Spirit
Authors
Order
Text
Book
Faithful
Hard
Remain
Make
Changes
Always
Impossible

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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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People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
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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.
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I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
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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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If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
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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?
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I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
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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.
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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
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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