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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
Understanding
Spirit
Authors
Order
Text
Book
Faithful
Hard
Remain
Make
Changes
Always
Impossible
Time
Almost

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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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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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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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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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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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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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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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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.
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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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I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.
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Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.
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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
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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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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 get and read an enormous number of first novels.
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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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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
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To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.
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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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