Quote

Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.

Richard Russo

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Russo
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: July 15
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Overwhelming
Task
Tasks
Small
Component
Working
Components
Whatever
Bites
Take
Reduce
Smallest

More quotes by Richard Russo

Image
... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
Richard Russo
Image
People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
Richard Russo
Image
Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
Richard Russo
Image
...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
Richard Russo
Image
In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
Richard Russo
Image
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?
Richard Russo
Image
America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
Richard Russo
Image
It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.
Richard Russo
Image
Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
Richard Russo
Image
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
Image
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.
Richard Russo
Image
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