Richard Russo Quotes

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.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

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?

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.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.

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.

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

Cary Grant never won an Oscar, primarily, I suspect, because he made everything look so effortless. Why reward someone for having fun, for being charming?

I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.

When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

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.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters thoughts with great understanding and depth.

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.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

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?

...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?

I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?

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.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?

... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

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

There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.

I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.

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.

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.