118 Quotes by David Berman

I don't have religion or culture. I don't have anything I can believe in when I'm really scared. When I play the songs, I feel the fear disappear.

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 try every day and every night to find a movie or a TV show that I can watch, but I just can't make it past ten minutes of anything.

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.

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.

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 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.

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