David Berman

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 bought a guitar when I was twenty. But I didn't write a song until I was 25 or 26. I never learned to play others songs. I learned to play my own songs while I was learning how to make them better. ”

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 believe that intermittent live performance has cut short the writing lives of touring musicians. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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

Pragmatism and romance are sort of opposites. ”

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. ”

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