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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Life
Territory
Separate
Often
Book
Trying
Much
Heartbreaking
Think
Occupy
Thinking
Hilarious

More quotes by Richard Russo

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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.
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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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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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.
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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I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
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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...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
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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Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
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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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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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
Richard Russo
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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.
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 was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
Richard Russo
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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
Richard Russo
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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.
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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I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
Richard Russo