Bausch Quotes & Sayings

There are situations of course that leave you utterly speechless. All you can do is hint at things. Words, too, can't do more than just evoke things. That's where dance comes in again. — Pina Bausch

My mother used to say, when the time is right, you don't need to have a committee meeting about it. — Richard Bausch

Everything must come from the heart, must be lived. — Pina Bausch

Raimund Hoghe is a little man with a spinal deformity who was once Pina Bausch's dramaturge. — Robert Gottlieb

I'm not interested in how people move, but what moves them. — Pina Bausch

I am more interested in what moves people, than how they move. — Pina Bausch

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt. — Richard Bausch

I don't read reviews. — Richard Bausch

I always write stories, and I write poems, too. I just never sell them to anybody, but I write them. They're good, too. They never leave the house. They're too disclosing. — Richard Bausch

Your fragility is also your strength. — Pina Bausch

To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life
not existing forms of dance. — Pina Bausch

Keep everything in context, and try to have each line doing more than one thing - not just giving exposition but also revealing character and history, etc. — Richard Bausch

When you reach a place where you feel blocked, lower your standards and keep on going. There is no possible way to do permanent damage to a piece of writing. You cannot ruin it. You can only make it a little better a little at a time. — Richard Bausch

Repetition is not repetition, ... The same action makes you feel something completely different by the end — Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch's motto was "Dance, otherwise we are lost." She really meant it, that dance was her answer to life and to the troubles and to the problems that can arise. That was her way to deal with everything, to dance. — Wim Wenders

I didn't want to imitate anybody. Any movement I knew, I didn't want to use. — Pina Bausch

I'm not so interested in how they move as in what moves them. — Pina Bausch

I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel. — Pina Bausch

The things we discover for ourselves are the most important. — Pina Bausch

Mostly you write to find out what you have to say. — Richard Bausch

Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable. — Robert Gottlieb

I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt. — Richard Bausch

The fact is, for all the critics' talk about me as a realist, I'm making everything up - everything. It is all about imagining with me. — Richard Bausch

He turned in a small circle and looked at the grass, the rocks, the river, the raining sky with its tatters and torn places, the shining bark of the wet trees all around. He could not think of any prayers now. But every movement felt like a kind of adoration. — Richard Bausch

To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most - suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another - are defeated. This work is not done as a job, ladies and gentlemen, it is done out of love for the art and the artists who brought it forth, and who still bring it forth to us, down the years and across ignorance and chaos and borderlines. — Richard Bausch

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane. — Richard Bausch

Write a little bit every day, each day. Visit it, every day - in other words, show up for work. — Richard Bausch

I want to feel something, as a person. I don't want to be bored. — Pina Bausch

The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT. Richard Bausch — Kathy Fish

A good story needs only a good storyteller. — Richard Bausch

In every circumstance, all my life, my mind shows me the possible bad outcome: someone walks down steps, and before I can do anything to head the image off, I see a fall, a catastrophe. — Richard Bausch

Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost. — Pina Bausch

When I first began choreographing, I never thought of it as choreography but as expressing feelings. Though every piece is different, they are all trying to get at certain things that are difficult to put into words. In the work, everything belongs to everything else - the music, the set, the movement and whatever is said. — Pina Bausch

So much of what folks want in the world turns out to be just a thing they say. Words change the way you feel for a small time and that just about goes as far as it can go toward being a true thing. — Robert Bausch

I love teaching. If I made a trillion dollars, I would still teach. It's different every day. You get to meet intelligent people all the time - or at least most of the time. — Richard Bausch