Quotes from Richard Bausch

I don't read reviews.

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.

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

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 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.

He turned in a small circle and looked at the grass, the rocks, the river, the raining sky with its tatters and torn places, the shining bark of the wet trees all around. He could not think of any prayers now. But every movement felt like a kind of adoration.

My mother used to say, when the time is right, you don't need to have a committee meeting about it.

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.

I had the thought that this is what true civilization really is; not the cities or the monuments or the statecraft or even the politics: but this. This slip of a lady, with barely the physical power to get around on her own unaided, holding a thousand others in thrall, threaded together on the silence by the force and power of her art, her being, her imagining.

I mean to express the quality of a memory, in order to say something about this life we live, so much of which is fugitive, so much of which is lost in the living of it.

A good story needs only a good storyteller.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.