Top 100 Richard Russo Quotes
#1. What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I'm not simply taking dictation.
Richard Russo
#3. If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn't, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite. By
Richard Russo
#4. Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.
Richard Russo
#5. 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.
Richard Russo
#6. Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
Richard Russo
#7. I hear you don't write any more," he says ...
"Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers."
"Not the same as writing a book though, right?"
"Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread.
Richard Russo
#8. I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
Richard Russo
#9. - You get more misanthropic every day.
- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.
Richard Russo
#10. I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again.
Richard Russo
#11. 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
#12. Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
Richard Russo
#13. If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.
Richard Russo
#14. Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully's opinion. Girl.
Richard Russo
#15. Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.
Richard Russo
#16. Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.
Richard Russo
#17. By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference.
Richard Russo
#18. Like I said, what makes people tick isn't neccessarily what makes them good. Fast-forward,
Richard Russo
#19. Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?
Richard Russo
#20. Begin laughing too, though they have no idea why. Which
Richard Russo
#22. Max would conclude, that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money.
Richard Russo
#23. Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.
Richard Russo
#24. old textile mill, which was in the process of being
Richard Russo
#25. When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in.
Richard Russo
#26. People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
Richard Russo
#27. Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.
Richard Russo
#28. When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.
Richard Russo
#29. witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility.
Richard Russo
#30. Since turning in his resignation, he'd been wondering what he might do next. Suddenly his path seemed clear. He would become an alcoholic. He
Richard Russo
#31. Diverting one's attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something.
Richard Russo
#32. They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,
Richard Russo
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. He had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.
Richard Russo
#36. 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.
Richard Russo
#37. People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
Richard Russo
#38. 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
#39. I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
Richard Russo
#40. Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
Richard Russo
#41. Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully
Richard Russo
#42. I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic's best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he's doing is easy is an occupational hazard.
Richard Russo
#43. He clearly regarded finding the glove compartment locked now as a disappointing development. Like arriving someplace for dinner, assuming you'd be welcome, and finding your place setting in the cupboard.
Richard Russo
#44. She never answers during the day," Max explained. "She lets her machine pick up."
People like you are the reason other people get answering machines to begin with," Miles told him. "In fact, people like you are driving a lot of modern technology.
Richard Russo
#45. There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
Richard Russo
#46. 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.
Richard Russo
#47. 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.
Richard Russo
#48. If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
Richard Russo
#49. 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.
Richard Russo
#50. Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two ...
Richard Russo
#51. 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.
Richard Russo
#52. 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
#53. If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.
Richard Russo
#54. 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.
Richard Russo
#55. 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
#56. Let us not forget Colby and the liberating effects of higher education. Though it doesn't liberate everyone, does it?
Richard Russo
#57. People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.
Richard Russo
#58. My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.
Richard Russo
#59. He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
Richard Russo
#61. Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five ...
Richard Russo
#62. Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.
Richard Russo
#63. 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.
Richard Russo
#64. No. Simplicity and justice require that thought and deed not be carelessly elided.
Richard Russo
#65. After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.
Richard Russo
#66. 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.
Richard Russo
#67. People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.
Richard Russo
#68. I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.
Richard Russo
#69. 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?
Richard Russo
#70. When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
Richard Russo
#71. She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.
Richard Russo
#72. ragged piece of thin glass jutted out of the socket, all that was left of the
Richard Russo
#73. It's not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name.
Richard Russo
#74. What an absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept.
Richard Russo
#75. 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
#76. Nor do I want the woman that I'm married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.
Richard Russo
#77. 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.
Richard Russo
#78. 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
#79. Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He'd been born to privilege, conditioned to expect things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong.
Richard Russo
#80. 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
#81. 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.
Richard Russo
#82. (God) seemed to know everything that was in her heart and to understand that nothing dwelt there that wasn't absolutely necessary to her survival.
Richard Russo
#83. 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
#84. 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.
Richard Russo
#85. I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to anyway.
Richard Russo
#86. You want a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?" Sully offered. "You don't have a stick," Will pointed out.
Richard Russo
#87. 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
#88. For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.
Richard Russo
#89. He'd meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. He'd also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to fuck up again.
Richard Russo
#90. So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.
Richard Russo
#91. I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around
Richard Russo
#92. America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
Richard Russo
#93. Probably horse doo had a name in french also, but that didn't mean god intended for you to eat it.
Richard Russo
#94. Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where
Richard Russo
#95. He was pouring vinegar onto the hot grill, where it sputtered and foamed and hissed. The air was full of it for a few seconds, enough to get everyone at the counter teared up, but just as quickly it was gone, with an implicit promise that anything so intensely horrible would be design pass swiftly.
Richard Russo
#96. I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
Richard Russo
#97. Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque.
Richard Russo
#98. people cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom. It
Richard Russo
#99. Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time?
Richard Russo
#100. Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?
Richard Russo
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