Quotes from Frederick Busch

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

The best defense is a good story.

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

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

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

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

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.

She better not die this time," I guess I said.

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.

I've been very self-indulgent and weird and I'm sorry. But I'd really like to die.

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

We live in several moments, several places, at once.

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

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