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

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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.
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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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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.
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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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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
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I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
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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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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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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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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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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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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 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.
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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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A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.
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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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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.
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I can be glib and truthful all at once.
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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
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