Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Frederick Busch
Age: 64 †
Born: 1941
Born: August 1
Died: 2006
Died: February 23
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Part
Ground
Seems
Reader
May
Writer
Terra
Matter
Seem
Stake
Need
Risk
Stakes
Needs
Dangerous
Explore
Work
Honest
Readers
Read
Anyway

More quotes by Frederick Busch

Image
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
Image
I always had good students.
Frederick Busch
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.
Frederick Busch
Image
I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.
Frederick Busch
Image
I know important literary writers who can't get published.
Frederick Busch
Image
Hollywood is the model for publishing, more and more. Not just blockbusters either.
Frederick Busch
Image
When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.
Frederick Busch
Image
I can't imagine having the courage to ask a publisher to do a whole book of my poems.
Frederick Busch
Image
I'm an amateur, so I read what's interesting to me.
Frederick Busch
Image
History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.
Frederick Busch
Image
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
Image
I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.
Frederick Busch
Image
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
Image
If there is some blood on the pages then you have some readership.
Frederick Busch
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I love thrillers. I would even read certain science fiction, although I haven't been a devotee for many years.
Frederick Busch