Richard Russo Quotes

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

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.

People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.

I can be glib and truthful all at once.

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.

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.

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.

America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.

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.

I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.

I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.

In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

- You get more misanthropic every day.- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.

An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them.

To his surprise he...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…that you cared about a great deal.

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.

Miles smiled. "Can you keep a secret?"Bea snorted. "Did I tell you what you were in for if you married my daughter?""No, " Miles conceded."Well, then, " she said, as if that settled the matter.

Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.