Quotes from David Berman

I have always had a blank spot where my regret is supposed to be.

I heard Springsteen was an unhappy person. I don't know, I haven't read his biography. But a lot of people in my field should be a lot more unhappy than they are.

If they told me I couldn't leave the radius of six miles from my house, I really wouldn't care. There's nowhere I really want to go.

The overlap between Pavement's fan base and people who liked Silver Jews was total. In my mind, even a local band with 20 fans had more unqualified support.

It's a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers' expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.

I think reporters think that they can get something extra out of a person face-to-face, but in reality people just give stock answers because there's a social situation going on.

When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do.

...and my signature is drawn in magic markeron the lower right hand corner of the windowso when something passes in the darkit's captured for a moment inside my work.

For a long time, I've struggled very, very much with what people call treatment-resistant depression.

I believe the stars are the headlights of angels driving from heaven to save us to save us...Won't you look at the sky? They're driving from heaven into our eyes. And though final words are so hard to devise, I promise that I'll always remember your pretty eyes.

You can't change the feeling but you can change your feelings about the feeling in a second or two

and my signature is drawn in magic marker on the lower right hand corner of the window so when something passes in the dark it's captured for a moment inside my work.

There were no new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understanding against.

Nude descending a staircase headless, not knowing where she is going but brave because all dreams lack conclusions and she is not enlisted to an ending.

It takes a society to raise a generation.

There are things I've given up on Like recording funny answering machine messages. It's part of growing older And the human race as a group has matured along the same lines. It seems our comedy dates the quickest. If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare's jokes I hope you won't be insulted if I say you're trying too hard. Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live seem slow-witted and obvious now.

When there's trouble I don't like running, but I'm afraid I got more in common with who I was, than who I am becoming

I passed out on the fourteenth floor. The CPR was so erotic.

out in the wide readership,his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket in the woods behind the Marriott, his younger brother who was missing that part of the brain that allows you to make out with your pillow. Poor kid.

He stood and watched the night push itself into the bar and the light push it back out.

As a way of getting in touch with my origins every night I set the alarm clock for the time I was born so that waking up becomes a historical reenactment and the first thing I do

As a way of getting in touch with my origins every night I set the alarm clock for the time I was born so that waking up becomes a historical reenactment...