3 December 2020 Richard Russo Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo Truth be told, 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.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo 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.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo 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.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo People often ask me how I make things funny. I don’t make things funny.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo 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.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don’t really think of myself as ‘writing humor.’ I’m simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo 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.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what’s funny in the joke.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They’re about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren’t necessarily about that.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic’s best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he’s doing is easy is an occupational hazard.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.
3 December 2020 Richard Russo I don’t think there’s a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I’ve got other stories to tell.
