Quotes from Richard Russo

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

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.

Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.

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.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

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

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.

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.

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.

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.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

We don't forgive people because they deserve it," she said. "We forgive them because we deserve it.

The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

To his surprise he...discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something…that you cared about a great deal.

he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.

I must be losing patience with my fellow humans, Miss Beryl went on. Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon.

An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.

aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

He'd meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. He'd also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to fuck up again.