Top 250 Richard Russo Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I’m delighted by how Nobody’s Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

53. “To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.”

— Richard Russo

54. “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

55. “La verdad no sirve como sustituto de una buena respuesta.”

— Richard Russo

56. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. It’s a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

58. “Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time?”

— Richard Russo

59. “We don’t forgive people because they deserve it,” she said. “We forgive them because we deserve it.”

— Richard Russo

60. “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

61. “Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.”

— Richard Russo

62. “He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.”

— Richard Russo

63. “I can be glib and truthful all at once.”

— Richard Russo

64. “By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference.”

— Richard Russo

65. “In this instance, she understood completely what the endorsement of a fool was worth.”

— Richard Russo

66. “I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

68. “If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn’t, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite. By.”

— Richard Russo

69. “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

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

— Richard Russo

71. “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

72. “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

73. “Miles couldn’t help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that’s what explained it. If it wasn’t simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque.”

— Richard Russo

74. “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

75. “To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

77. “She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.”

— Richard Russo

78. “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

79. “The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life.”

— Richard Russo

80. “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

81. “He wasn’t always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.”

— Richard Russo

82. “One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you’d tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Miss Beryl looked for in each adult face was the evidence of some failed lesson in some distant yesterday that might predict incompetence today.”

— Richard Russo

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.”

— Richard Russo

87. “The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

89. “After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart’s impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

92. “Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.”

— Richard Russo

93. “Maybe sheetrocking wasn’t one of Sully’s favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it’d get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years – that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.”

— Richard Russo

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

— Richard Russo

95. “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

96. “Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.”

— Richard Russo

97. “Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully’s opinion. Girl.”

— Richard Russo

98. “It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.”

— Richard Russo

99. “For years now he’d believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.”

— Richard Russo

100. “Whereas some people’s attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn’t, Mrs. Whiting’s implied that she knew everything you didn’t. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.”

— Richard Russo