Top 60 David Berman Quotes

I hear luxury brand names, I cringe.

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.

You don’t meet too many actors in Nashville.

I ask myself when I see a new album: ‘Is this an album that they needed to make, or do they need to just keep making albums?’

I’ve had to stop going to the nearest grocery store that seems to play Shania Twain’s ‘Forever and For Always’ whenever I’m there. It’s hard to shop for frozen entrees through cold-air blasted tears. Feels good on a flushed face though.

I guess on all Silver Jews records, it’s extremely male-centric.

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.

Pragmatism and romance are sort of opposites.

Sometimes I turn the TV just below where you can hear it and write down what I think they might be saying by the mumbles and rhythms.

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.

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’m not a good singer.

Some people like my singing. But it sounds like bad singing to a lot of other people.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn’t be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.

All my songs were made at the end of the neck, ‘farmer’s corner’ chords.

I imagine that I’m less famous than the 15th ranked bowler in the world.

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 made records for 20 years, I lived off it. But people would say I made so many mistakes, I did so many things you’re not supposed to do. I had a band name nobody could say. I didn’t play live. I never practiced, I never got better at my instrument.

I have this Martin electric/acoustic that’s made of black formica. Really cool.

Allen Ginsburg was wrong about a lot of things, but especially when he said, ‘First thought, best thought.’

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.

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

People younger than me trust me. People my age do not. They think I’m up to something. And I’ve often felt this.

I’ve never done much to try to build an audience.

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.

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 world of commerce is a kind of a purgatory itself.

If I believed in fate I’d be very curious why I picked the name Silver Jews.

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.

The songs of mine that don’t work, the ones that I wouldn’t consider playing live for instance, fail to integrate their idiosyncracies. It’s not that they fail because they’re boring, but because they overreach.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Lyrically, country music is the most satisfying music for me.

My father is a despicable man.

I grew up the son of a businessman. And I didn’t get into music to be a businessman.

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.

When people tend to be happier they have more interest in the world around them.

I always had a background belief in God. In other words, instinctually I’ve never doubted that we are not alone.

My great grandfather was the last practicing Jew in my family. He died in 1982.

I was not born to be the center of attention in a crowded room.

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

My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would’ve hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.

Definitely in everything I do, the comic is a part of it.

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.

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.

I read Henry Miller’s ‘Nexus,’ ‘Sexus’ and ‘Plexus’ the summer after I graduated from college. It cemented my decision to spurn any and all careers.

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

The greatest thing about Nashville is that it’s welcoming.

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.

I’m not convinced I have fans.

Natalie Maines has a voice for the centuries.

Obviously there was the idea that we could sell more records if we played live, but I guess I didn’t care enough to sell more records to do that.

Silver Jews was always a coolection of old friends. Uncoolection.

I trust myself.

I always loved bands with mystique.

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

I don’t have room in my mind to think about musical equipment.