Richard Russo Quotes

Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

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

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?

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 get and read an enormous number of first novels.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

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

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.

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.