Rick Bass Quotes

#1. Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation.

George Plimpton

#2. Once again ... Rick Bass draws us into his magical human worlds, rendered urgently by a hypnotic prose that tracks a parallel and untamed natural world, often with a trace of loss and always patrolled by unmistakable decency. He is a master of this form ...

Doug Peacock

#3. Fit in where you don't: make your own space..be different..don't give in. Exist somewhere you're not suppose to, or where you don't want to. Be your own men; do what you want, and don't hurt anybdoy

Rick Bass

#4. I've heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner.

Rick Bass

#5. I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

Rick Bass

#6. The Ploughmen is part inspired fever-dream, part adventure story, a lyric parable of not just goodand evil but of the vast and beautiful and often lonely country in-between. Kim Zupan is a wonder.

Rick Bass

#7. Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?

Rick Bass

#8. Hellbenders. I collected with exuberance and totality, bringing home almost everything I could get my hands on, and releasing them into the assorted outdoor terrariums or aquariums in my back yard (the turtles I let run wild in the yard, like dogs or cats).

Rick Bass

#9. Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.

Rick Bass

#10. I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.

Rick Bass

#11. I think the idea of holing up and hunkering down against the larger forces of the world has not lost its allure since Thoreau's time. If anything that instinct, or impulse, continues to reside in almost all of us, sometimes activated or bestirred and other times dormant but always present.

Rick Bass

#12. The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.

Rick Bass

#13. How we fall into grace. You can't work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.

Rick Bass

#14. There are people who think the film 'This Is Spinal Tap' is simply a very funny 'mockumentary.' Well, with Yes, we lived it. Take the hilarious scene in the film in which the bass player is trapped in a giant pod - that actually happened to Alan one night.

Rick Wakeman

#15. Sometimes I imagine I can feel the earth pause in its rotation, can feel it pause and look at us as if wondering, Just who the hell do you think you are?

Rick Bass

#16. Write every day. Don't ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing - and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing. Don't become self-satisfied, don't stop moving ahead, growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?

Rick Bass

#17. You can't manufacture love: you can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then you hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assaults of time.

Rick Bass

#18. The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery
a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.

Rick Bass

#19. There's the slightly intoxicating feeling that accompanies the largest blizzards - the realization that there's a chance, increasing by every second, that you are about to be trapped by beauty.

Rick Bass

#20. We try and map boundaries, and to string fence - we try to set up a border between life and death, between man and nature, and complicity versus innocence. But the truth is, there is no complicity, there is no innocence; and there is no death, there is only life.

Rick Bass

#21. Even the largest of my dreams and ambitions, I realize with increasing dismay, were puny, measly, compared to the object of my dreaming. I would not say my life to date has been built overmuch of compromise, but still, it surrounds me.

Rick Bass

#22. A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

Rick Bass

#23. Ceremony. When we've lost that, we've lost everything, and are only wandering in the dark, like chickens or lambs waiting for eagles.

Rick Bass

#24. Veryone has to do one really bad thing in life to call their life a life.

Rick Bass

#25. The natural world is the only one we have. To try to not see the natural world - to put on blinders and avoid seeing it - would for me seem like a form of madness. I'm also interested in the way landscape shapes individuals and populations, and from that, cultures.

Rick Bass

#26. I've lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once 'created,' or produced, the art of fiction.

Rick Bass

#27. To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one's life.

Rick Bass

#28. There are those among us who are more dog people than others - and a dog person without a dog is missing something. I

Rick Bass

#29. Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.

Rick Bass

#30. Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?

Rick Bass

#31. My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.

Rick Bass

#32. There are none among us who have not been, even for a moment, cruel to those whom we love most, as if unable, in that moment, to shoulder any longer the magnificent weight and burden, the responsibility, of that love.

Rick Bass

#33. The mountains have always been here, and in them, the bears.

Rick Bass

#34. Every spare moment was spent tromping about in the exploration, pursuit, and gathering of elusive living things; or, when the weather was too stormy, reading about the exploration, pursuit, and gathering of elusive living things. We

Rick Bass

#35. The rich-soil part, the mystery beneath all those reasons, is that I love it. There is an awareness, an addictive alertness, a super-heightened sensitivity that approaches and then becomes a kind of spirituality.

Rick Bass

#36. When you sign on to be an activist in northwest Montana, people in the grocery store will avoid eye contact, particularly if they're hanging out with outspoken opponents to your views.

Rick Bass

#37. Nature, and the original system that created us, must always remain somehow with us, the bedrock of our movements and actions. What is our duty? To live a life.

Rick Bass

#38. Live long enough and all weaknesses will be illuminated, but again perhaps that is not all bad for cannot they then begin to become strengths?

Rick Bass

#39. Everyone knows that when advancing into danger, the soprano goes first. They are your infantry, while the altos and tenors are your cavalry, and the bass your artillery.

Rick Riordan

#40. I like a lot of bass players. I like a lot of tuba players too.

Rick Danko

#41. His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes.

Rick Bass

#42. I do believe that clean air, clean water, and wild mountains and old forests are our birthrights; that a wild and healthy landscape is, or should be, a constitutional right, a freedom, to be protected and celebrated. And as with any right, there is an attendant responsibility. I

Rick Bass