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"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."
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"Employers are at their happiest on Mondays. Employees are at their happiest on Fridays."

"Back then, work revolved around life. Today, life revolves around work."

"Love by the sweat of thy brow.Not through whispered words of hollow sound or lofty dreams ne'er substance bound that more than oft do run aground. Nay, love with mighty, blistered hands that turn the soil and carve the land. A bearer of toil and golden band. Be strong! A founder of the feast! Protective knight who slays the beast! For promises and vows aloud are naught but wispy veneer shroud like cobwebs, frail, the airy words and wooing fail. So work, my darling. Toil as proof. Thy loyal heart be drained of youth and yet beat on, incessant sound. Both feet take root within the ground, and service be thy kingly crown.Love by the sweat of thy brow."

"Your life content reduces with employment."

"A specialist's mind is a slave to his specialization."
Explore more quotes by 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."
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