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Richard Russo quotes - page 2
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.
Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
Richard Russo
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
What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.
Richard Russo
Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.
Richard Russo
People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.
Richard Russo
A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
Richard Russo
I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
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. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, "I just want to be entertained." This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means we shouldn't go to movies together.
Richard Russo
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. 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? In "serious" fiction (as in "serious" film) you can feel the weight of the material. You expect to see the effort and the strain of all that heavy lifting, and we reward the effort as much as the success. Comedy is often just as serious, and to ignore that seriousness is misguided, of course, but most writers with comic world views have accustomed themselves to being sold at a discount. Most of us wouldn't have it any other way.
Richard Russo
Harold and I tried to plant new trees, but they won't take because of the roots. You got to dig up the old stumps and they go way down. It cost a lot and the roots go everywhere. Under the streets and the lawns. We got them in our cellar. And you seen the sidewalks." I said I had. "You'd like to plant a tree or two, but where?" "The roots will die eventually," I said, trying to be optimistic, since she really wanted to plant trees. "That's what I said. Harold says no. He says they just petrify there in the ground, making it impossible for anything alive to find root and grab ahold. 'Course Harold is a sourpuss. I think sometimes he just says things like that so he won't have to go out and try. Some people would rather do without trees than dig a little hole.
Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.
Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
I can be glib and truthful all at once.
Richard Russo
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.
Richard Russo
I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.
Richard Russo
I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
Richard Russo
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