Quotes By Richard Russo

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.