Rick Bass
Rick Bass
Rick Bassis an American writer and an environmental activist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 March 1958
CountryUnited States of America
art lost spark
I've lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once 'created,' or produced, the art of fiction.
avoid blinders form interested natural seem shapes
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.
thinking long plot
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.
mountain bears
The mountains have always been here, and in them, the bears.
powerful heaven world
Sometimes I perceive that there is a stillness and a wholeness in the world or in some portion or corner or fragment of the world or some little place in time where things just feel so right and huge and powerful and easy that I will have the perhaps blasphemous thought maybe there are layers of heaven.
movement action duty
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.
real people challenges
A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.
succeed nonfiction results
Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.
time long weakness
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?
waste would-be want
To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one's life.
dream ambition compromise
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.
real thinking people
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.
responsibility weight moments
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.
eye views people
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.