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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.

-Richard Russo

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Since Her Retirement From

Richard Russo

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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.

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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.

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

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

I'm Delighted By How Nobody's Fool Turned Out. It Was A Rare Movie.

You Can Be Interested In A Jane Smiley Novel Whether Or Not Anyone Says A Word. She Enters Into Her Characters Thoughts With Great Understanding And Depth.

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

One Of The Nice Things About Our Marriage, At Least To My Way Of Thinking, Is That My Wife And I No Longer Have To Argue Every Thing Through. We Each Know What The Other Will Say, And So The Saying Becomes An Unnecessary Formality. No Doubt Some Marriage Counselor Would Explain To Us That Our Problem Is A Failure To Communicate, But To My Way Of Thinking We've Worked Long And Hard To Achieve This Silence, Lily's And Mine, So Fraught With Mutual Understanding.

That Afternoon I Came To Understand That One Of The Deepest Purposes Of Intellectual Sophistication Is To Provide Distance Between Us And Our Most Disturbing Personal Truths And Gnawing Fears.

In The End It All Came Down To Companionship, To Friendship, To Sacrifice, To Compromise.

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

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?

To Expect Reason Is Where The Fallacy Lies.

One Of The Odd Things About Middle Age, He Concluded, Was The Strange Decisions A Man Discovers He's Made By Not Really Making Them, Like Allowing Friends To Drift Away Through Simple Neglect.

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 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?

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.

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.

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

The Line Of Gray Along The Horizon Is Brighter Now, And With The Coming Light I Feel A Certainty: That There Is, Despite Our Wild Imaginings, Only One Life. The Ghostly Others, No Matter How Real They Seem, No Matter How Badly We Need Them, Are Phantoms. The One Life We're Left With Is Sufficient To Fill And Refill Our Imperfect Hearts With Joy, And Then To Shatter Them. And It Never, Ever Lets Up.

You Use Simple Brushstrokes In A Screenplay For Things Over Which You Would Take Much Greater Pains In A Novel.

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

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.

I Get And Read An Enormous Number Of First Novels.

You Can't Possibly Judge Your Ability To Control Something Until You've Experienced The Extremes Of Its Capabilities. Do You Understand?

What I Discovered I Liked Best About Striking Out On My Bicycle Was That The Farther I Got From Home, The More Interesting And Unusual My Thoughts Became.

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.

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.

Why Mince Words? Beautiful Ruins Is An Absolute Masterpiece.

Have You Ever Noticed That When People Use The Expression 'i Have To Say', What Follows Usually Needn't Be Said?

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

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

... Baggott Enjoys Living On The Knife Edge Between Hilarity And Heartbreak And That Makes Her A Writer After My Own Heart.

Cary Grant Never Won An Oscar, Primarily, I Suspect, Because He Made Everything Look So Effortless. Why Reward Someone For Having Fun, For Being Charming?

I Can Be Glib And Truthful All At Once.

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.

A Lot Of My Characters In All Of My Books Have A Self-destructive Urge. They'll Do Precisely The Thing That They Know Is Wrong, Take A Perverse Delight In Doing The Wrong Thing.

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

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

At The Risk Of Appearing Disingenuous, I Don't Really Think Of Myself As 'writing Humor.' I'm Simply Reporting On The World I Observe, Which Is Frequently Hilarious.

I'm Not An Easy Man. I Can Be An Entertaining One, Though It's Been My Experience That Most People Don't Want To Be Entertained. They Want To Be Comforted.

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

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

I Just Have This Feeling That If It Weren't For The Gloversville Free Library That I Probably Would Not Be A Writer.

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When You Don't Know What To Do, Try Something; If That Doesn't Work, Try Something Else.

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