Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “When you don’t know what to do, try something; if that doesn’t work, try something else.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

5. “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

6. “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

7. “I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?”

— Richard Russo

8. “America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we’re losing part of ourselves.”

— Richard Russo

9. “Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.”

— Richard Russo

10. “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

11. “People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.”

— Richard Russo

12. “Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don’t drink so much. There aren’t going to be enough liver transplants to go around.”

— Richard Russo

13. “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

14. “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

15. “Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world’s longest, most thrilling conversation.”

— Richard Russo

16. “You look like your mom,” he said, smiling.”

— Richard Russo

17. “She’s gone. When they leave like that, they don’t come back and say they’re sorry.”

— Richard Russo

18. “In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.”

— Richard Russo

19. “You can’t possibly judge your ability to control something until you’ve experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?”

— Richard Russo

20. “Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?”

— Richard Russo

21. “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

22. “Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?”

— Richard Russo

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.”

— Richard Russo

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom.”

— Richard Russo

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?”

— Richard Russo

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.”

— Richard Russo

41. “Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.”

— Richard Russo

42. “It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.”

— Richard Russo

43. “What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?”

— Richard Russo

44. “I read pretty voraciously. If it’s good, I don’t care what it is.”

— Richard Russo

45. “People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.”

— Richard Russo

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Just because things happen slow doesn’t mean you’ll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you’d be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. “Slow” works in an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.”

— Richard Russo

49. “Because yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels. Though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo