Quotes from Richard Russo

But for some reason, these periods of melancholy were important to him, and he rode them out the way some people did migraines.

Yes," she said, looking off somewhere. "I want Ã¢â'¬Â¦ my own true love." Her own true love. The outrageous simplicity, modesty, and arrogance of it took my breath away. It seemed to me, then and now, a wish that everyone had a right to, but that only the very foolish or the terminally naïve trouble themselves over.

They might have been interesting if the people beneath had done the writing, but the living had nothing worthwhile to say about the dead.

Even pain was preferable to numbness, at least for a while, and hope, once indulged, was only as delicious as it was short-lived.

Neither beauty nor innocence nor the best of intentions can alter that which has always been.

But I'll feel better about you in Connecticut. People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake. They can devote their whole lives to it.

you missed what you didn't have far more than you appreciated what you did have. It was for this reason he'd always felt that owning things was overrated. All you were doing was alleviating the disappointment of not owning them.

As a boy, he had not realized what his father must have known, that pain could have a cumulative effect. Your ability to withstand it had much to do with your ability to catch your breath between its assaults.

He knew from his experience overseas that if you only got shot by people aiming at you specifically, war wouldn't have been nearly such a hazardous affair.

you loved. You didn't love them any less, but it was nice not to have to lug them around. And since this was the way of things, why not let nature work in her favor?

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

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.

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.

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.

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.