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" 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. "

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" 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

Find

You

Trust

" 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. "

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

Richard Russo

Will

Structure

" I can be glib and truthful all at once. "

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

Richard Russo

Theme

Looking

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

" I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland. "

" I get and read an enormous number of first novels. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Richard Russo

Truth

Writer