82 Quotes by Richard Price

I write because I write – as anyone in the arts does. You’re a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You’re a writer because this is what you do.

As he reached for his Visa card, the security monitor next to the register caught Billy in all his glory: football burly but slump-shouldered, his pale face with its exhaustion-starred eyes topped with half a pitchfork’s worth of prematurely graying hair. He was only forty-two, but that crushed-cellophane gaze of his combined with a world-class insomniac’s posture had once gotten him into a movie at a senior citizen’s discount.

I don’t write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

I write because I can’t imagine not writing.

I don’t need all that much – I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they’re going to get into, and I’ll write myself out of their jam.

He had the kind of droopy eyes that suggested he had never recovered from the exhausting experience of being born.

I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don’t like to write – I like to be finished.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes.