David Grossman Quotes

I write to save someone's life, probably my own

I am what I am again: a writer. I have metabolized the injury into art.

I need to be able to write a poem after every film and to kind of cleanse myself from the character because for about three months or so, I'm constantly living through the character's eyes.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

I'm a musician. I write songs. I just hope when the day is done I've been able to tear a little corner off of the darkness.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

I just write when fear overtakes me.

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

One of the reasons that any person writes anything is to try and keep his own sanity together.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

I could be going through something in my life that I might not want to talk about in my music because my music is the way that I escape some of those things.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

I think many writers write because it's a convenient way to explain themselves to themselves. We take the chaos and the turmoil and the bullshit of our lives, and we make it into something that has a harmonious shape and sound.

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear; my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?

I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it.

I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.

The world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind some poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I'm always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.

Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.