Truth be told, Im not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though its been my experience that most people dont want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. – Richard Russo
About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldnt find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that werent good were good. – 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 dont mean to. – Richard Russo
Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me. – Richard Russo
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity. – Calvin Coolidge
So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and… Wanda Sykes and John Legend… were adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And thats the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship. – Henry Louis Gates