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

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

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

I can be glib and truthful all at once.
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.
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.
Richard Russo

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

I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is.
Richard Russo

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

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

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.
Richard Russo

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

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

I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.
Richard Russo

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

I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.
Richard Russo

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

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

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