217 Quotes by Richard Russo

My favorite teacher in college advised me not to write a book until it was impossible not to.

I must be losing patience with my fellow humans,” Miss Beryl went on. “Anymore I’m all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I’ll be voting Republican soon.

La verdad no sirve como sustituto de una buena respuesta.

Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully – people still remarked – was nobody’s fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application – that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man’s, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable – all of which he stubbornly confused with independence.

The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life.

He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn’t understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.

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.

What you can’t afford to lose is precisely what the world robs you of. How it knew what you needed the most, just so it could deny you that very thing, was a question for philosophers. Answer it and you’d have the kind of book Tom Ford would’ve considered worth writing: urgent and new and absolutely necessary. To write it, though, you’d have to be on fire.

Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He’d been born to privilege, conditioned to expect things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong.