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
Sensible
Grid
Skill
Grids
Vast
Erroneous
Conclusion
Weigh
Skills
Conclusions
Information
Evaluate
Much
Arrive
Meaningless
Sneezed

More quotes by Richard Russo

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Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
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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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Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
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My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.
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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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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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Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.
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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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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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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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To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.
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