Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Price

Price is describing the peculiar blindness that comes with authorship: the work you made stops being an object and stays a living memory. When he says he can "read it and see it physically", he’s separating the artifact from the experience of making it. The pages exist, the movie plays, but the author can’t encounter them the way a stranger does because every line is welded to the decisions, compromises, and private motivations that produced it. What looks like a clean scene to us is, to him, a battlefield of alternate drafts and rejected solutions.

The line "I can't accurately judge it" isn’t false modesty; it’s a claim about distance as a prerequisite for criticism. Taste requires a kind of amnesia. Price’s subtext is that self-evaluation becomes an unreliable instrument when you remember what you were trying to do, what you had to cut, what the budget or the editor or the room demanded. That’s especially pointed coming from a novelist-screenwriter hybrid: film and TV writing in particular is collaborative, over-determined, and famously haunted by what might have been.

His final admission - ten reads, ten reactions - is the most revealing. He’s not saying the work is infinitely interpretable; he’s saying his mood, his aging, his shifting values will keep rewriting the meaning of his own choices. The book doesn’t change. The author does. And that instability is both a warning (don’t trust the creator as the final critic) and a quiet defense of art as something even its maker can’t fully pin down.