Quote

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.

Richard Russo

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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Information
Evaluate
Much
Arrive
Meaningless
Sneezed
Sensible
Grid
Skill
Grids
Vast
Erroneous
Conclusion
Weigh
Skills
Conclusions

More quotes by 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.
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America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
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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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There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
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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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Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
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One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.
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To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.
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By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.
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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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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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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.
Richard Russo
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
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