Frederick Busch Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

If a writer is honest, if what is at stake for him can seem to matter to his readers, then his work may be read. But a writer will work anyway, as I do, and as I have, in part to explore this terra incognita, this dangerous ground I seem to need to risk.

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

I always had good students.

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

First-book novelists and storywriters haven't yet failed and so it's easier to publish them - you can gamble on a success. Whereas someone who has written four books that are highly literary and demanding and require you as a reader. They may not be republished.

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

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?"

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.

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

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.

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

We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.

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

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

The education of young people is narrowing. They cannot have the scope they used to have. They are being taught in high school by people earnest, still, but maybe less well-prepared than we would want them to be - but not because they are stupid or churlish.

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

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

I get to meet writers, and I love writers.

History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.

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

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

In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.

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

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

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.

The best defense is a good story.