Richard Bausch > Quotes

“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.”
― Richard Bausch

“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.”
― Richard Bausch

“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.”
― Richard Bausch, Peace

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

“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.”
― Richard Bausch

“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.”
― Richard Bausch

“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.”
― Richard Bausch, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction: Seventh Edition

“Monstrosity was Smitty’s word; he used it in almost every context to mean vaguely that thing he couldn’t quickly name or understand. “Bring me that—monstrosity over there, will you?” he’d say, meaning a pitcher of water.”
― Richard Bausch, The Stories of Richard Bausch

“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.”
― Richard Bausch, On Writing

“I said nothing about her jeans, which were big enough to throw over a rhinoceros and keep it dry in the rain.”
― Richard Bausch, The Stories of Richard Bausch

“Prosperity can be as hard on good spirits as anything else.”
― Richard Bausch, The Stories of Richard Bausch

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “That stuff about getting spoiled by money is what rich people say to make poor people think it’s better to be poor. We’re rich, and I don’t feel a bit different, except I’m a whole hell of a lot happier.”
― Richard Bausch, The Stories of Richard Bausch