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.”

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

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

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

“It’s not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you’ve given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.”

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

“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.”

“Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.”

“An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.”

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

“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.”

“Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.”

“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.”

“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.”

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