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" 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. "

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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

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

" My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired. "

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

" 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. "

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

Richard Russo

Theme

Looking

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "