A biography for Richard Russohasn’t been written yet.
“A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.”
“Interesting, Miles thought. Like himself, Father Mark, as a child, had been reassured by the imagined proximity of God, whereas adults, perhaps because they so often were up to no good, took more comfort from His remoteness.”
“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.”
“I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.”
“You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.”
“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.”
“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.”
“People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.”
“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.”
“People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.”
“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 looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?”
“Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“...he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.”
“I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.”
“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.”
“I get and read an enormous number of first novels.”