Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Price

The line lands because it punctures the romantic myth of the writer as someone who wakes up eager to commune with the muse. Richard Price, a novelist and screenwriter steeped in the grind of draft-after-draft realism, admits the unglamorous truth: the job is less “inspiration” than resistance management. “Offices all over the place” reads like a joke about discipline-as-theater. The classic advice is to build a routine, curate the perfect desk, sanctify the workspace. Price flips it: he can manufacture infinite workplaces because the real obstacle isn’t location, it’s the work itself. Avoidance is portable.

“I don’t like to write - I like to be finished” is the cleaner cut. The dash functions like a hard edit, a blunt revision to the sentimental narrative. Writing, for him, isn’t pleasure; completion is. That’s not laziness, it’s an acknowledgement of what writing actually feels like when you’re doing it seriously: prolonged uncertainty, the humiliation of bad sentences, the endless negotiation between what you meant and what the page will tolerate. Being “finished” is the moment when the anxiety stops moving.

Context matters: Price comes out of a tradition (think Elmore Leonard by way of urban reportage) where craft is labor, not mysticism. The intent is partly comic self-exposure, partly permission slip. If you’re avoiding the work, you’re not uniquely broken; you’re in the club. The subtext is bracing: professionalism isn’t loving the process. It’s returning to it anyway, office after office, until “finished” becomes real.