Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Price

Creative work here is framed less as vocation than compulsion, a small revolt against the culture industry’s favorite question: Why do you do it? Price refuses the tidy narratives of inspiration, profit, or self-improvement. The repetition is the point. "I write because I write" is a tautology that shuts down interrogation, like a witness who won’t embellish. It’s also a defense: if writing is a choice, it can be judged like a consumer preference; if it’s a necessity, it becomes closer to breathing, messy but nonnegotiable.

The line "as anyone in the arts does" quietly universalizes the experience while policing it. Real artists, in this view, aren’t dabblers or brand-builders; they’re people with an itch that won’t let them sleep. Price’s painter/writer parallel turns creativity into a bodily imperative, not an Instagram identity. That’s the subtextual jab: the work isn’t validated by audience approval, awards, or cultural capital. It validates itself through persistence.

Context matters because Price’s career has lived in the trenches of American realism: novels rooted in street-level moral pressure, screenwriting that translates interior life into scenes that have to earn their keep. For a writer who’s navigated both literary prestige and Hollywood’s transactional logic, the claim reads like a boundary line. Don’t ask him to rationalize the impulse in market terms. Don’t ask for a myth. The intent is to protect the private engine of the work from public accounting, insisting that the most honest explanation is also the least performative one: this is what you do.