Top 30 Richard Russo Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Usually by the time I finish a book tour I’ve just about had it with the book.

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.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

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?

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

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

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.

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