About Richard Russo: Richard Russo is an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and teacher.
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...
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?
Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.
A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
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.
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'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.
I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.
People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.
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.
I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't...
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.
Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
