Frederick Busch Quotes

Oh, a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don't bother to wrap it, thanks. I'll eat it here.

Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.

Baseball is a game where you are always waiting, and then when something happens it's like turning a kaleidoscope when you were a kid.

I love thrillers. I would even read certain science fiction, although I haven't been a devotee for many years.

There is a lack of context in contemporary education. And contemporary consideration - because we live in those interiorities so much. Especially young kids who live by surfing the Web.

I love baseball. What I love about baseball is that you are always waiting.

I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.

Stephen King has the exact ability that Charles Dickens had. To get to his readers in spite of or despite anything the reviews say.

I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.

I know important literary writers who can't get published.

When you are writing a character, what the character says is obviously crucial. But what the character doesn't say is absolutely as important as his words.

I don't think I want to write a third book. But the more people talk to me about it, the more I think maybe I do.

Hollywood is the model for publishing, more and more. Not just blockbusters either.

Let's look at what the books are that are being produced. More and more they are being made like movies. To sell. They are being tested out.

When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.

What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.

My heroes are people like Philip Levine, who is simply like a god to me, as a writer. And he is a very good man, too.

I get to meet writers, and I love writers.

I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.

I can't imagine having the courage to ask a publisher to do a whole book of my poems.

I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.

The culture is with some rapidity fearing its imagination. I don't know why. Imagination is not of interest.

You have to read history. You have to have a sense of history.

The best defense is a good story.

Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave.

What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.

I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.

I always had good students.

It's harder to get hold of the world. It's harder to understand the world, to encompass the literature necessary for the information.

I don't think the world is particularly responsive to - our world, the culture we are in, to art right now.

The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.

I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.

If there is some blood on the pages then you have some readership.

It's hard to read real fiction. It takes time. It takes a sustained attention.

Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"

The people who make reality are angry peasants with old cannon shells wired together, an anti-vehicle device.

People do not read, by and large. They watch television.

I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.

I'm an amateur, so I read what's interesting to me.

History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.

... Within the mind, especially the mind under great stress... boundaries of space and time are meaningless, and the... interior self lives by other rules and in other dimensions.