Richard Grossman Quotes

• You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there, obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there, kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth.

  Richard Grossman

  Law, Class, Community

  7 Copy quote

• I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now.

  Richard Grossman

  Real, Player, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school.

  Richard Grossman

  Life Changing, Writing, School

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• The problem with American democracy is the American corporation, which is a slave holder construct, pure and simple. It's totally invasive, and people are as tightly controlled within the walls of a corporation as they are in a totalitarian society.

  Richard Grossman

  Wall, Simple, People

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

  Richard Grossman

  Novelists, Poet, Individual

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm a staunch civil libertarian; I really believe that the individual is more important than any societal value.

  Richard Grossman

  Believe, Important, Libertarian

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm a centrist. There is a lot going on socially that I don't like, but I feel that in a democracy you work from the center, not because I like the center - I'm a marginalized person politically - but because the center is where things get done.

  Richard Grossman

  Democracy, Done, Feels

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism.

  Richard Grossman

  Thinking, Brutality, Common

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.

  Richard Grossman

  Moving, Writing, Trying

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• My books are not about different components that fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, it's about creating the space around the components, which is almost as important as the components themselves. And that space changes and blends depending upon what the components are.

  Richard Grossman

  Book, Jigsaw Puzzles, Creating

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  9 Copy quote

• When you're reading my book, you're not in a four dimensional continuum, you're in my continuum, the Grossman continuum.

  Richard Grossman

  Book, Reading, Four

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think not in two or three dimensional terms but in five dimensional terms when I consider a novel. There's height, width, and depth, there's the time factor, and then there's the factor which I call the cerebral factor of the reader, the way the reader adjusts to all the other dimensions, which is the fifth dimension.

  Richard Grossman

  Thinking, Two, Depth

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I love grand scale. One of the things that everybody mentions is that my novels are beautiful objects in the sense that the elements of the actual book are being extruded and re-contextualized.

  Richard Grossman

  Beautiful, Book, Elements

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I've been in the art world for many years. But the sad fact is that most writers are visually prepubescent. Generally speaking, the literary world is provincial when it comes to matters of art. And it always has been.

  Richard Grossman

  Art, Years, World

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam.

  Richard Grossman

  Writing, Unique, Levels

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I write about life as it exists within houses and on the streets. And there's nothing, hopefully, in any of my characterizations or in any of my plottings or in any of my valuations that doesn't ring true to life. I'm a novelist. I'm not a theoretician.

  Richard Grossman

  Writing, House, True Life

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I have a strong spiritual commitment, and I try to express that in my work. Salvation cannot be worked out in human terms. The point of my writing is to touch upon the systematics of prayer and on how we arrive at a method of achieving spiritual coherence in our lives.

  Richard Grossman

  Spiritual, Strong, Prayer

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

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