Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

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

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

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

Richard Russo

Will

Structure

" America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions. "

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

" Writers are people who put pen to paper every day. "

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

Richard Russo

Theme

Looking

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious. "

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

" 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. "

Richard Russo

Sometimes

Slow

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "