Quotes from David Berman

I have bad vision, but it's not distorted. It's low power!

It takes a society to raise a generation.

Yeah, once the song is written, it just complexifies the profile of it to have the music and the words at odds. It comes naturally to me. A lot of my music is like that.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

I mean, I wasn't fortunate enough to have ever experienced starting out with a band and sticking with them, so that would be interesting to me. People whose bands start out like that, when they break up it's always terrible.

The world of commerce is a kind of a purgatory itself.

I'm not the type to demand affirmation or to worry that I'll be forgotten. I'm more the type to dare the world to forget me.

It must be very strange to live in the world of Willie Nelson or Bruce Springsteen or Pearl Jam. I don't know what kind of handle they have on their own loss of talent.

I take pride in the fact that I can walk away from things. My willingness to walk away has protected me, I realize that now. Being able to walk away from sessions, from poetry, from dreams of being a poetry professor.

My whole life I've tried to find the thing I can do that other people can't do, and invest in that, and the one thing I can do is write narratives and build characters. I can do that.

I want so many artists that I care about to go away and grow up, and have been amazed at how hard that is for some people to do.

I don't think any songwriter who comes up through playing clubs can really claim to have independently developed their art. All along the way so much information is coming, the writer inside the performer unconsciously reacts to all of that. By the time they get to be thirty, the writer is gone.

Fan reaction is so out-sized and hyperbolic in rock music compared to other arts.

When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists.

That's the way I've always been, between the albums: For two- or three-year gaps I wouldn't pick up a guitar. And when I don't pick up a guitar for a year or two, that's when the songs fall out.

Like they used to say about Joe Montana, he threw soft because he couldn't throw hard. He was successful because he didn't try to do what he couldn't. I couldn't rock out harder than everybody, or overpower people with mastery like Jack White of the White Stripes, so why try? That's why I've always worked harder on words.

I still believe in putting something out and not asking people to buy the record, then buy a ticket to my show and then buy a t-shirt and then a, like, copy of the show they just saw on CD. That's undignified to me.

For the first 12 years of recording I would finish the album, then on the day it came out I'd never hear the songs again.

Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.

When you can't see you become very timid about space and moving. You become less aggressive and less tenacious. Lots of things that shouldn't be affected by vision really are. And you don't even know what they are until they become unstuck.

If critics were harder on the musicians that they love, there would be better songs. But as they grow older and they lose their talent, critics refuse to let them know that and protect them, and they get to the point where they put out music that just isn't up to the levels where they've already been.

Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.

In an email... like I did 100 interviews, and I never repeated one story. That's impossible to do when you do face-to-face interviews, because your brain locks and you say the same thing over and over again.

There are enough really good love songs and I don't even know if I could write one if I tried.