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" 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. "

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" 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? "

Richard Russo

Someone

Having Fun

Look

" 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? "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

Richard Russo

Will

Structure

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Richard Russo

People

Look

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

" 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. "