David Berman Quotes

I'd just like to inspire people to be themselves and do what they want and not conform to the rigid guidelines of the music or entertainment business.

I'm certainly not who people think I am. I always do whatever I want to do, and my films are personal to me.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

I don't care about commercial success. I get to do what I love and communicate whatever I want.

Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.

My way of living and working is that I'll do my thing. I went from one thing to another. That annoyed people. They didn't know how to categorize me.

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.

I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.

Art is maybe a subversive activity. There is a certain rebellion when you are an artist at heart, even if only in the art of living.

I don't like to be labeled, to be anything. I've made the mistake before myself of labeling my music, but it's counter-productive.

I have too many fantasies to be a housewife. I guess I am a fantasy.

I was just, like, not at all the office type; I was the artist type.

Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.

I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

Most artists like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, as independent characters.

I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.

I'm not an artist or a collector. I'm a skateboard kid with no one to tell me if I'm not doing things the right way.

People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.

I've never done anything for money. My first love is things of limited commercial appeal. I could be happy doing Shakespeare for the rest of my life.

I have never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

I just do whatever I do, and put it out there without tryin' to cater to anybody. If you like it, you like it.

I dug the idea that I was being perceived as the black sheep of my family, but for me, it was like, I was a rebel, and that to me was most important.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.

If I somehow felt like having a site which strictly validates was an indication of my manhood, maybe I'd do it, but it really means very little to me. We're mavericks over here, what can we say?