Richard Grossman Quotes

#1. 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

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

Richard Grossman

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Richard Grossman

#11. 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

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

Richard Grossman

#13. 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

#14. 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