The future's so random, and so mobile, there's no way you're going to get to your vision of what you want your community to be just by chance alone. I really believe you have to let people know, to use your voice, to say, 'this is what I like about my place, I want to keep it this way, this is what I think can be improved, this is what I disapprove of.' That's the only way you can have a part in shaping the future.
Rick BassHow 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 BassWrite every day. Don't ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writingโand if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing.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 BassI 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 BassThe 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 BassSometimes 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.
Rick Bass