217 Quotes by Richard Russo

Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it’s always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?

I just have this feeling that if it weren’t for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.

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

Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I just wisht – ” “What?” Rub sighed. Where to begin? “That I’d be nicer to you?” He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. “I wish I would, too,” he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up.

Lincoln chuckled yet again. “What’s that poem you’re always quoting? About parents?” Teddy nodded. “Larkin.

I read pretty voraciously. If it’s good, I don’t care what it is.

One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you’d tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Miss Beryl looked for in each adult face was the evidence of some failed lesson in some distant yesterday that might predict incompetence today.

Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.

I’ve never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.