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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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Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Easily
Focus
Bring
Future
Difficult
Uninvited
Past
Inspection
Odd
Offered

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In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
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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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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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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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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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What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
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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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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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