Frederick Buechner Quotes

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Taking on different characters and seeing things through the eyes of different people is interesting to me. When I look at what people are going through in life, I try to understand their story.

I've been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.

To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.

I like writing historical fiction.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

When I play games, I'll make up little stories for just anything. It's almost the game of making up background stories for people you see on the street. You know what I mean? I wasn't exactly the popular kid in school growing up, so I found myself really observing people, and watching how they interact, and how they react to things.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.