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" I can be glib and truthful all at once. "
Richard Russo
I Can
Truthful
Once
Related Quotes:
" 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
End
Back
Mind
" Writers are people who put pen to paper every day. "
Richard Russo
Who
Day
Every Day
" 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
Writing
View
Good
" 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
Good
Health
Think
" 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? "
Richard Russo
Someone
Having Fun
Look
" People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny. "
Richard Russo
Destiny
Small
People
" 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. "
Richard Russo
People
Easy
Experience
" 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
Think
Way
Ireland
" I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about. "
Richard Russo
Think
Anybody
I Think
" 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
Find
You
Trust
" 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
Try
Think
Life
" 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
You
Parent
Feel
" 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
You
Great
She
" 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
Thinking
Genuine
Horror
" 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
Long
Caring
Writing
" If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life. "
Richard Russo
Theme
American
Class
" People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny. "
Richard Russo
People
Funny
Ask
" 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
Tired
Independence
Reading
" 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
Sometimes
Slow
Me
" 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
Look
Back
Find
" 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. "
Richard Russo
Know
Wrong Thing
Doing
" A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once. "
Richard Russo
Almost
Mind
Short
" I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class. "
Richard Russo
Think
Class
Just
" Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view. "
Richard Russo
Point Of View
Everyone
Child
" I get and read an enormous number of first novels. "
Richard Russo
Number
Read
Get
" 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
Book
Body
Nobody
" 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
Here
Never
Going
" 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
Memory
Think
Imagination
" America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves. "
Richard Russo
Losing
Lose
America
" 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
End
Worry
People