By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.
- Richard Russo Quote

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

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?
- Richard Russo Quote

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

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

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.
- Richard Russo Quote

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

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

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
- Richard Russo Quote

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote

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.
- Richard Russo Quote