1.
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.
Frederick Busch
2.
Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.
Frederick Busch
3.
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.
Frederick Busch
4.
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.
Frederick Busch
5.
I love thrillers. I would even read certain science fiction, although I haven't been a devotee for many years.
Frederick Busch
6.
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.
Frederick Busch
7.
I love baseball. What I love about baseball is that you are always waiting.
Frederick Busch
8.
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.
Frederick Busch
9.
It's harder to get hold of the world. It's harder to understand the world, to encompass the literature necessary for the information.
Frederick Busch
10.
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.
Frederick Busch
11.
I always had good students.
Frederick Busch
12.
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.
Frederick Busch
13.
Hollywood is the model for publishing, more and more. Not just blockbusters either.
Frederick Busch
14.
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.
Frederick Busch
15.
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.
Frederick Busch
16.
I know important literary writers who can't get published.
Frederick Busch
17.
I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.
Frederick Busch
18.
I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.
Frederick Busch
19.
The best defense is a good story.
Frederick Busch
20.
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.
Frederick Busch
21.
What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.
Frederick Busch
22.
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.
Frederick Busch
23.
If there is some blood on the pages then you have some readership.
Frederick Busch
24.
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.
Frederick Busch
25.
I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.
Frederick Busch
26.
I don't think the world is particularly responsive to - our world, the culture we are in, to art right now.
Frederick Busch
27.
The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.
Frederick Busch
28.
The culture is with some rapidity fearing its imagination. I don't know why. Imagination is not of interest.
Frederick Busch
29.
You have to read history. You have to have a sense of history.
Frederick Busch
30.
I'm an amateur, so I read what's interesting to me.
Frederick Busch
31.
It's hard to read real fiction. It takes time. It takes a sustained attention.
Frederick Busch
32.
What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.
Frederick Busch
33.
When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.
Frederick Busch
34.
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.
Frederick Busch
35.
I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.
Frederick Busch
36.
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.
Frederick Busch
37.
History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.
Frederick Busch
38.
I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.
Frederick Busch
39.
I can't imagine having the courage to ask a publisher to do a whole book of my poems.
Frederick Busch
40.
I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.
Frederick Busch
41.
I get to meet writers, and I love writers.
Frederick Busch
42.
Stephen King has the exact ability that Charles Dickens had. To get to his readers in spite of or despite anything the reviews say.
Frederick Busch
43.
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?"
Frederick Busch
44.
The people who make reality are angry peasants with old cannon shells wired together, an anti-vehicle device.
Frederick Busch
45.
People do not read, by and large. They watch television.
Frederick Busch
46.
I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.
Frederick Busch