Posts tagged Pulitzer Prize winning author
“And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don’t take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.”―Richard Russo; Empire Falls
Richard Russo’s book The Straight Man made it into ShortList.com’s 30 Funniest Books Ever.
Straight Man – Richard Russo: “The male mid-life crisis is a rich playground for novels. The inherent comedic value in such a ludicrous Western capitalist notion gives authors room for plenty of manoeuvre. But to balance that with the needs of a weighty tome, that takes some skill. Russo has it in spades. Straight Man concerns the life of Hank Devereaux, an interim chairman of an English department. As he takes on his wife, the faculty, his daughter, his feelings for three women and the campus geese, Devereaux’s life slowly begins to unravel.”
People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.
I bought this at work the other day. I love Richard Russo’s novels so I’m very excited to read his memoir.
So … read & write.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.
What about books that disappoint? Many do. These, in my life, fall into two classes: boring, turgid books that I’ll never want to read; and interesting and worthy books whose hour has not yet come.
“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.” —Richard Russo
“There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.”
—Philip Roth; The Human Stain
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that ore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson read and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Cormac McCarthy; Blood Meridian
[Can you say run-on sentence? But, a damn good one!)
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.
All the quotes on this site are marked with the author's name, except those marked with TBV; those quotes are my own.
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