Richard Russo

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke. ↗

— Richard Russo

#funny #joke #kill #laboriously #too

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

#books #closely #comic #each #i

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

— Richard Russo

#efficiently #handle #movies #necessarily #novels

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

#books #even #except #exist #i

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

— Richard Russo

#everyone #point #point of view #view #well

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

— Richard Russo

#destiny #more #much #people #share

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

— Richard Russo

#funny #how #i #make #me

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes. ↗

— Richard Russo

#always #authors #book #changes #faithful

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. ↗

— Richard Russo

#characters #delight #doing #know #lot

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling. ↗

— Richard Russo

#comprehending #deepest #failures #fiction #fiction writer