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As I Drift Back Into Sleep, I Can't Help Thinking That It's A Wonderful Thing To Be Right About The World. To Weigh The Evidence, Always Incomplete, And Correctly Intuit The Whole, To See The World In A Grain Of Sand, To Recognize Its Beauty, Its Simplicity, Its Truth. It's As Close As We Get To God In This Life, And Reside In The Glow Of Such Brief Flashes Of Understanding, Fully Awake, Sometimes For Two Or Three Seconds, At Peace With Our Existence. And Then Back To Sleep We Go.

-Richard Russo

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As I Drift Back

Richard Russo

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As I Drift Back Into Sleep, I Can't Help Thinking That It's A Wonderful Thing To Be Right About The World. To Weigh The Evidence, Always Incomplete, And Correctly Intuit The Whole, To See The World In A Grain Of Sand, To Recognize Its Beauty, Its Simplicity, Its Truth. It's As Close As We Get To God In This Life, And Reside In The Glow Of Such Brief Flashes Of Understanding, Fully Awake, Sometimes For Two Or Three Seconds, At Peace With Our Existence. And Then Back To Sleep We Go.

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Was Anything In The World Truer Than That Intuitive Leap Of The Heart?

I Think The Darker Aspect Of My Fiction-or Anybody's Fiction-is By Its Very Nature Somehow Easier To Talk About.

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.

Movies Have To Handle Time Very Efficiently. They're About Stringing Scenes Together In The Present. Novels Aren't Necessarily About That.

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 Suppose All Writers Worry About The Well Running Dry.

Why Mince Words? Beautiful Ruins Is An Absolute Masterpiece.

The Other Possibility Was That There Was No Right Thing To Say, That The Choice Wasn't Between Right And Wrong But Between Wrong, More Wrong, And As Wrong As You Can Get.

Right Thing To Say

When I Start Getting Close To The End Of A Novel, Something Registers In The Back Of My Mind For The Next Novel, So That I Usually Don't Write, Or Take Notes. And I Certainly Don't Begin. I Just Allow Things To Percolate For A While.

Worse, I Have To Admit To Feeling The Jealousy Of One Crab For Another That Has Managed To Climb Out Of The Barrel.

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.

People Who Imagine Themselves To Be Self-made Seldom Enjoy Examining The Process Of Manufacture In Detail.

Odd That The Future Should Be So Difficult To Bring Into Focus When The Past, Uninvited, Offered Itself Up So Easily For Inspection.

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.

Since Her Retirement From Teaching Miss Beryl's Health Had In Many Respects Greatly Improved, Despite Her Advancing Years. An Eighth-grade Classroom Was An Excellent Place To Snag Whatever Was In The Air In The Way Of Illness. Also Depression, Which, Miss Beryl Believed, In Conjunction With Guilt, Opened The Door To Illness. Miss Beryl Didn't Know Any Teachers Who Weren't Habitually Guilty And Depressed-guilty They Hadn't Accomplished More With Their Students, Depressed That Very Little More Was Possible.

Were It Not For Occam's Razor, Which Always Demands Simplicity, I'd Be Tempted To Believe That Human Beings Are More Influenced By Distant Causes Than Immediate Ones. This Would Especially Be True Of Overeducated People, Who Are Capable Of Thinking Past The Immediate, Of Becoming Obsessed By The Remote. It's The Old Stuff, The Conflicts We've Never Come To Terms With, That Sneaks Up On Us, Half Forgotten, Insisting Upon Action.

Whatever You're Working On, Take Small Bites. The Task Will Not Be Overwhelming If You Can Reduce It To Its Smallest Component.

Where Was The Middle Ground Between A Sense Of Adventure And Just Plain Sense?

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.

If You Work At Comedy Too Laboriously, You Can Kill What's Funny In The Joke.

Even At Its Most Perceptive, Sociology Deals In Abstractions.

Knowing And Knowing What To Do About It Were Two Different Things.

I’ve Always Known That There’s More Going On Inside Me Than Finds Its Way Into The World, But This Is Probably True Of Everyone. Who Doesn’t Regret That He Isn’t More Fully Understood?

There Are A Great Many Sins In This World, None Of Them Original.

Which Is Why We Have Spouses And Children And Parents And Colleagues And Friends, Because Someone Has To Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves. We Need Them To Tell Us. We Need Them To Say, "i Know You, Al. You Are Not The Kind Of Man Who.

If There's An Enduring Theme In My Work, It's Probably The Effects Of Class On American Life.

Structure Is One Of The Things That I Always Hope Will Reveal Itself To Me.

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A Short Story Is Something That I Think Can Be Intuited And Envisioned And Held In Your Mind Almost At Once.

It's Possible To Overlook Character Flaws Of In-laws For The Simple Reason That You Feel Neither Responsible For Them Nor Genetically Implicated.

Don't Even The Best And Most Fortunate Of Lives Hint At Other Possibilities, At A Different Kind Of Sweetness And, Yes, Bitterness Too? Isn't This Why We Can't Help Feeling Cheated, Even When We Know We Haven't Been?

America Has Always Been A Nation Of Small Places, And As We Lose Them, We're Losing Part Of Ourselves.

People Often Ask Me How I Make Things Funny. I Don't Make Things Funny.

What If All Everybody Needed In The World Was To Be Sure Of One Friend? What If You Were The One, And You Refused To Say Those Simple Words?

Ultimately, Your Theme Will Find You. You Don't Have To Go Looking For It.

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.

I Can Be Glib And Truthful All At Once.

To Weigh And Evaluate A Vast Grid Of Information, Much Of It Meaningless, And To Arrive At Sensible, If Erroneous, Conclusions, Is A Skill Not To Be Sneezed At.

I Was The One Who Did Come Through That Door. You Were The One She Was Waiting For.

I Don't Think America Has Ever Had A Center The Way London Is The Center Of England Or Dublin Is The Center Of Ireland.

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.

As I Drift Back Into Sleep, I Can't Help Thinking That It's A Wonderful Thing To Be Right About The World. To Weigh The Evidence, Always Incomplete, And Correctly Intuit The Whole, To See The World In A Grain Of Sand, To Recognize Its Beauty, Its Simplicity, Its Truth. It's As Close As We Get To God In This Life, And Reside In The Glow Of Such Brief Flashes Of Understanding, Fully Awake, Sometimes For Two Or Three Seconds, At Peace With Our Existence. And Then Back To Sleep We Go.

A Couple Years Ago, The Novelist Russell Banks Told Me He Was Reading The Ancient Greek Historian Herodotus. I Asked Why. He Said, 'because I've Always Wanted To And Am Tired Of Having My Reading Assigned.' I Thought It Was A Marvelous Declaration Of Independence.

To Expect Reason Is Where The Fallacy Lies.

I Told Him The Truth, That I Loved Him And Didn't Regret Anything About Our Lives Together. But Do We Ever 'tell The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth, So Help Me God' As My Father Used To Say, To Those We Love? Or Even To Ourselves? Don't Even The Best And Most Fortunate Of Lives Hint At Other Possibilities, At A Different Kind Of Sweetness And, Yes, Bitterness Too? Isn't This Why We Can't Help Feeling Cheated, Even When We Know We Haven't Been?

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...aware, As Always, That The Truth Isn't Much Of Substitute For A Good Answer.

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Stories Worked Much The Same Way . . . A False Note At The Beginning Was Much More Costly Than One Nearer The End Because Early Errors Were Part Of The Foundation.

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