Best 42 quotes of Frederick Busch on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

I always had good students.

History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

The best defense is a good story.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

....he knew that he'd run into his destiny as a man in the dark walks into a wall.

It is the kind of moment life gives us when it laughs. It is choosing without choice. A rich meagerness, that.

No matter his joking, I thought, this was a man as given to the miseries as I was. You could look into my dead face and find my living eyes. In his case, the life and death were reversed, and the flesh of his face was living ground, while his eyes were little monuments to lifelessness buried therein.

... 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.