Richard Bausch Quotes

One writes to find words' meanings.

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.

When you write, what's going on in your life shines through in the songs.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.'

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

I can't remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else.

Writing on 'Love' is so steeped in self-analysis. The writer's room can feel like therapy.

When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

When I start writing, my unconscious, my conflicts, my thoughts all start to come up. So for me, writing is an exploration. I never know how my stories will end.

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.

When you start to write, things begin to come into focus in a way they don't when you're not writing. It's a very good way to find out how much you don't know because you learn specifically what you need to know that you don't know at the moment by writing.

My best writing has always been in journals.