Top 100 Richard Russo Quotes
#1. I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
Richard Russo
#2. My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils.
Richard Russo
#3. 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
#4. There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
Richard Russo
#5. 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
#6. You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.
Richard Russo
#7. Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you?
Sully: Not often. Now and then.
Richard Russo
#8. The sad, fucking truth was that no matter who you are, you never, ever, get your fill.
Richard Russo
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully
Richard Russo
#12. Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?
Richard Russo
#13. 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.
Richard Russo
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
Richard Russo
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,
Richard Russo
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility.
Richard Russo
#25. When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.
Richard Russo
#26. 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
#27. He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.
Richard Russo
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life.
Richard Russo
#31. Let us not forget Colby and the liberating effects of higher education. Though it doesn't liberate everyone, does it?
Richard Russo
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done.
Richard Russo
#35. 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
#36. I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.
Richard Russo
#37. The more you had, it seemed to me, the larger your border that needed defending.
Richard Russo
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
Richard Russo
#42. What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation.
Richard Russo
#43. I must be losing patience with my fellow humans," Miss Beryl went on. "Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon.
Richard Russo
#44. 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.
Richard Russo
#45. 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
#46. It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn't much better.
Richard Russo
#47. You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?
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. He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn't understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.
Richard Russo
#50. 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.
Richard Russo
#51. ... a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect.
Richard Russo
#52. 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
#53. Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.
Richard Russo
#54. 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
#55. If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.
Richard Russo
#56. Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.
Richard Russo
#57. 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.
Richard Russo
#58. Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.
Richard Russo
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.
Richard Russo
#62. 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.
Richard Russo
#63. Amazing, isn't it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?" In
Richard Russo
#64. They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me.
Richard Russo
#65. - You get more misanthropic every day.
- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.
Richard Russo
#66. Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own ... Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do ...
Richard Russo
#67. I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.
Richard Russo
#68. 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
#69. Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
Richard Russo
#70. 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
#71. Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.
Richard Russo
#72. 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
#75. 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
#76. Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
Richard Russo
#77. People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.
Richard Russo
#78. Bullshitting god would be Max's plan in a nutshell. Miles could even guess his father's opening gambit. He'd point out to God that if He expected better results, He ought to have given Max better character to work with, instead of sending him into battle so poorly equipped.
Richard Russo
#79. People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.
Richard Russo
#80. Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.
Richard Russo
#81. Straight Man: But my daughter belongs to a talk show generation that seems to be losing the ability to discriminate between public and private woes.
Richard Russo
#82. 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.
Richard Russo
#83. 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
#84. old textile mill, which was in the process of being
Richard Russo
#85. Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.
Richard Russo
#86. 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
#87. The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subconscious where things that are too terrible to contemplate are permanently stored.
Richard Russo
#88. I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is.
Richard Russo
#89. Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?
Richard Russo
#90. 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.
Richard Russo
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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.
Richard Russo
#95. Begin laughing too, though they have no idea why. Which
Richard Russo
#96. 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.
Richard Russo
#97. 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
#98. The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.
Richard Russo
#99. Like I said, what makes people tick isn't neccessarily what makes them good. Fast-forward,
Richard Russo
#100. By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference.
Richard Russo
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