Richard Russo quotes

Richard Russo is a renowned American author known for his compelling storytelling and keen observations of blue-collar lives in small-town America. Born in 1949 in Johnstown, New York, Russo's literary career took off after the publication of his breakthrough novel "Nobody's Fool," which was later adapted into a film starring Paul Newman. His works often explore themes of family dynamics, friendship, and the struggles of ordinary individuals. With his sharp wit and emotional depth, Russo has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "Empire Falls." He continues to captivate readers with his powerful narratives, crafting vivid characters and exploring the complexities of the human experience.

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

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

- Richard Russo

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

- Richard Russo

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

- Richard Russo

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

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

- Richard Russo

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Richard Russo

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

- Richard Russo

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

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

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

- Richard Russo

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

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.

- Richard Russo

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

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

- Richard Russo

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

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

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

- Richard Russo

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

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

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

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

- Richard Russo

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

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

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

- Richard Russo