Quotes from Ezra Furman

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.

God is close to the brokenhearted, and God lifts up the lonely. That was a message that was explicitly quoted to me and was part of my upbringing: Brokenhearted people and poor people and people who are in trouble should be your focus, and you should be on their team.

Just being a normal person and having a social life involves a lot of dishonesty for me.

I am frustrated at misconceptions of me, and being cast in a role.

Judaism is a way of thinking, more than anything else, that I think is entirely distinct, and the more you know of it, the more you can enter into that kind of thinking.

I'm in this effort to unify my life and to live day to day in a disciplined way, to be real at all times, not just in front of people, or not just in a synagogue.

I don't like the notion that artists have a responsibility to be political.

Being in a rock n' roll group, or being a musician, it is in conflict in some serious cultural ways with being an observant Jew, but in a conceptual way, for me, they go together real well.

We need a lot more visibility of queer people in public life. People gotta get used to it.

I think I'm becoming a climate activist.

I don't think I'll ever be able to fully explain the way that the Velvet Underground's records opened a door in my head. But it has something to do with Lou Reed as a mythic figure: a person who fitted no category, who defied limits and trends and definitions.

One of my goals in making music is to make the world seem bigger, and life seem larger.