Richard Bausch Quotations

The fact is, for all the critics' talk about me as a realist, I'm making everything up - everything. It is all about imagining with me.

Keep everything in context, and try to have each line doing more than one thing - not just giving exposition but also revealing character and history, etc.

Write a little bit every day, each day. Visit it, every day - in other words, show up for work.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

Read the writers whose work is still around and has survived the winds of fashion and the attacks of the ignorant and the bigoted - read everything you can get your hands on.

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.

I love teaching. If I made a trillion dollars, I would still teach. It's different every day. You get to meet intelligent people all the time - or at least most of the time.

In every circumstance, all my life, my mind shows me the possible bad outcome: someone walks down steps, and before I can do anything to head the image off, I see a fall, a catastrophe.

I always write stories, and I write poems, too. I just never sell them to anybody, but I write them. They're good, too. They never leave the house. They're too disclosing.

When you reach a place where you feel blocked, lower your standards and keep on going. There is no possible way to do permanent damage to a piece of writing. You cannot ruin it. You can only make it a little better a little at a time.

To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most—suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another—are defeated. This work is not done as a job, ladies and gentlemen, it is done out of love for the art and the artists who brought it forth, and who still bring it forth to us, down the years and across ignorance and chaos and borderlines.

A good story needs only a good storyteller.

Mostly you write to find out what you have to say.

I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt.