12 Quotes by Frederick Busch

... 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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