Richard Russo
Richard Russo
Richard Russois an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and teacher...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 July 1949
CountryUnited States of America
books bought cheap glasses good home noticed period suddenly though trouble wife year
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.
dad book years
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.
book thinking trying
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.
sympathy book writing
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.
book hard-times order
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.
memories book thinking
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.
book character self
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.
book secret trying
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.
library world bookstores
Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.
paper pen people writers
Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.
failures likely quite truth writer
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.
best comedy easy humor illusion imagine people result seriously taking trick work worry
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.
american-novelist dramatic offer stories
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.
american-novelist characters easiest simply speaking
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.