Quotes from Richard Russo

Had I been more, I'd be more. Simple.

This would be especially true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote.

Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?

his conviction that he was not put here in this world to learn other people's lessons. He'll accept his punishment because he has no choice, but he'll pass when it comes to the education...If we were capable of learning our lessons we'd become obedient. Sensing this, we're dead set against moral instruction.

Later in life, he was fond of remarking, rather ruefully, that he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, "Yes, dear.

It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.

Most people, he concluded, were selfish, greedy, unprincipled, venal, utterly irredeemable shit-eaters, but he'd also observed that these same people were highly sensitive to criticism.

People for whom summer wasn't a verb.

People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

That she should so puzzled him that he even questioned his behavior, entertaining, albeit briefly, the idea that he might in some fashion be responsible for the apparition of his once loving wife, who had faithfully awaited his return from overseas, now calmly and purposefully blasting away, without visible remorse, in the general direction of his life and property. They

Humour is a poor substitution for accuracy, and a poorer proxy for truth

But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done.

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.

But six months always seemed a long way off to Sully, who was by and large an optimist and who always concluded that in six months he'd be better off than he was now for the simple reason that he couldn't be any worse off.

Why did people say things like that about him, Randall wondered. It was as if someone had started a rumor when he was a baby and by now everybody had heard it. He never seemed strange to himself, despite the conventional wisdom.

maybe people did wear chains of their own forging, but often those chains were half complete before they'd added their own first heavy link. Maybe completing other people's work was the business of life.

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me.

Who are you talking to?" "This goose," I assure him. And in fact he looks relieved. "I was afraid you were talking to yourself.

You want a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?" Sully offered. "You don't have a stick," Will pointed out.

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that is what my mother made me.

Como yo era niño, toleraba poco el misterio y la imprecisión, de modo que andaba pegado a mi madre todo el tiempo.

They would be on the brink of a serious falling out when suddenly the danger would pass as if it had never existed—"like a fart in a gale of wind," as Dan liked to say. He had a way of saying the most patently offensive things, plain or profane, without offending. A rare gift, she concluded. The other men in her life somehow always managed to offend even when they were tiptoeing.

Jesus, sixty-six years old. He'd hoped that by now he wouldn't have to be so vigilant, that given enough time the madness--because that's what his spells amounted to--would ebb.

As always, to Sully, the deepest of life's mysteries were the mysteries of his own behavior.