David Small Quotes

I’m not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they’re like. They are in love with language. They’re obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren’t more special than anybody else’s, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.

– David Small

To understand somebody else as a human being, I think, is about as close to real forgiveness as one can get.

– David Small

My kids’ books all have a darkness to them.

– David Small

Mama had her little cough. Once or twice, some quiet sobbing, out of sight… Or the slamming of kitchen cupboard doors. That was her language.

– David Small

I’ve always been interested in a certain kind of sophistication in children’s literature. I loved Roald Dahl; I loved the underlying nastiness of some of his – darkness of his tales.

– David Small

I’m deeply in love with my wife, and she’s my best friend, and yet we share different viewpoints of life, which I think is one of the things that holds our marriage together. She came from Texas, and she has an optimistic view of life. I came from Detroit and have a very pessimistic view.

– David Small

I don’t like my parents; I never will. I didn’t cry at either of their funerals. I haven’t missed them for five seconds. I didn’t – you know, our characters were so at odds with one another right from the beginning. But I do understand them now as human beings, with the understanding of an adult.

– David Small

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the ’70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

– David Small

I was in college in the sixties when movies really got good. I’m a fan of Bergman and Hitchcock and Polanski and Antonioni. Those are my gods.

– David Small

I just totally do not believe in this sort of Bart Simpson character who infects so much of our literature and film and TV stuff nowadays, these know-it-all kids who seem to understand the hypocrisy of the adult world so thoroughly and can talk about it with such articulateness. That’s bunk.

– David Small