Top 8 Quotes by David Grossman

We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller.

We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller.

Writing, Doe, World

David Grossman (2008). “Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics”, p.44, Macmillan

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

David Grossman

Writing, Character, Reality

I like to do things that frighten me. When I’m afraid, I understand more things. I want the feeling... All my instincts cry out against it, every morning anew. Then I say, ‘I should do it. If I don’t do it, no one will do it for me.

David Grossman

Morning, Feelings, Want

You describe your reality in the highest resolution even when it’s a nightmare and in doing so, you live your own life, not a cliche others have formulated for you.

David Grossman

Reality, Nightmare, Cliche

"David Grossman: 'I cannot afford the luxury of despair'". Interview with Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. August 28, 2010.

And there will be a time, not for long, a month is enough, or a week, when every single person will be able to completely fulfill what they were meant to be—everything their bodies and souls have offered them, not what other people have dumped on them.

David Grossman

Long, People, Soul

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

David Grossman

Writing, Mean, Desire

I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy.

David Grossman

Writing, Army, Government