Quotes By Richard Russo

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

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.

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.

About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.

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.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

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.

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 can be glib and truthful all at once.

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

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.

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 get and read an enormous number of first novels.

Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.