Richard Russo (born July 15, 1949) is an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and teacher.
Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed-guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible.
You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.
Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.
Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.
Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.
I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.
. . . Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
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?
You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.
The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.
Stories worked much the same way. . . A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.
I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?
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.
People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.
People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.
You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?
Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?
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.