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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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"If you need an alarm clock, you need a new job."

"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do."

"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."

"A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth."

"Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing."

"Speaking about work isn't working."

"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary."
Explore more quotes by 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."

"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."

"Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that."

"Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes."

"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."

"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."

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