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.

The best defense is a good story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I always had good students.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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