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"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."
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Exlpore more Sympathy quotes
"Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion."
"All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness."
"I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one."
"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud."
"California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?"
"There is a third quality to friendship, and it is not as easy to put into a single word. The right word, literally, is 'sympathy' - sym-pathos, common passion. This means that friendships are discovered more than they are created at will."
"But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people--first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again."
"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."
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