David Berman

“As a way of getting in touch with my originsevery night I set the alarm clockfor the time I was born so that waking upbecomes a historical reenactment...”

“It takes a society to raise a generation.”

“All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter.”

“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.”

“A lot of the Jews I met in Israel, almost all of them are secular. They get turned off by their religion, in the same way that Americans get turned off Christianity by people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.”

“I was 29 or 30 when I felt sure of what I was doing, but not fully identifying as a songwriter until I was 37.”

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

“I trust myself.”

“My only advice would be to someone right now, is if you're in a position in your life where you need to make a change, this is the best time.”

“I've never been a big movie person, but I used to watch movies regularly in my life, and sometime in the '90s I just stopped. I certainly never was an educated moviegover.”

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

“I've never done much to try to build an audience.”

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

“Mostly i write on an unplugged Mustang or a Baby Taylor.”

“It frustrated me at college that all the acts in the Top 10 were like The Moody Blues and Phil Collins. It was like why did we get stuck with the last generation's music, why can't we have our own?”

“I can't imagine putting my name on a t-shirt. For someone to wear my name? Me? It's ridiculous.”

“As a way of getting in touch with my originsevery night I set the alarm clockfor the time I was born so that waking upbecomes a historical reenactment and the first thing I do”

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

“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.”

“In the beginning, it was meant to be like a faceless art piece. Then I did the first record and it received enough notice to satisfy my needs. I questioned the procedure out of fear. The Silver Jews was never meant to be recreated live.”