Quotes from Richard Russo

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can be glib and truthful all at once.

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.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

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.

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.

I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.

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

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 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.

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.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

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.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

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.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

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