Richard Bausch Quotes

The painful part of being a new writer on 'ER' is that you come on with all these great ideas, and you find out we've already done them.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it.

It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

My stories are never quite good enough.

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

I won't write a book. I haven't got a magnum opus in me.

I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.

I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.

I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process.

So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

I tend to write things and don't go the next step and try to get it published. I don't want to do book signings and stuff.

I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

I used to write stories and poetry, but for some reason I have it in my head that if I'm going to write, I have to write a script.

We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.