David Shields Quotes

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

David Shields

• Architecture

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Quotes to Explore

• I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.

  

  Hans-Ulrich Obrist
  • Time
  • Music
  • Science

• I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world.

  

  Tadao Ando
  • People
  • World
  • Believe

• Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

  

  Rafael Vinoly
  • Music
  • Thinking
  • True

• You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?

  

  Patricia Marx
  • Time
  • Different
  • Country

• The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

  

  Salvador Dali
  • Art
  • Beauty
  • Architecture

• The fun never goes out, but it changes with the years, with winning and losing.

  

  Bear Bryant
  • Fun
  • Winning
  • Changes

• The general public, formerly profoundly indifferent to everything to do with building, has been shaken out of its torpor; personal interest in architecture as something that concerns every one of us in our daily lives has been very widely aroused; and the broad line of its future development are already clearly discernible.

  

  Walter Gropius
  • Future
  • Daily
  • Architecture

• If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

  

  Quincy Jones
  • Music
  • Architecture
  • Frozen

• The development of the New Architecture encountered serious obstacles at a very early stage of its development. Conflicting theories and the dogmas enunciated in architects' personal manifestos all helped to confuse the main issue.

  

  Walter Gropius
  • Serious
  • Architecture
  • Obstacles

• As a child, my father's architecture seemed to me to be industrial in a way. It seemed harsh and kind of chilly; I didn't respond to it.

  

  Nathaniel Kahn
  • Father
  • Child
  • Architecture

• In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

  

  Nancy Banks Smith
  • Experience
  • Door
  • Architecture

• The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

  

  Federico Garcia Lorca
  • City
  • Human
  • Architecture

• The Internet has created an incredible democratization of the architecture industry.

  

  Cameron Sinclair
  • Internet
  • Architecture

• Architecture is invention.

  

  Oscar Niemeyer
  • Architecture
  • Invention

• I am a failed architect, if I'm honest. I got a degree in art history and was about to get another degree, in architecture, but realized I would be terrible at building things because I've got really bad spatial awareness.

  

  Hannah Ware
  • Art
  • Bad
  • History

• I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.

  

  I. M. Pei
  • Mother
  • Me
  • Architecture

• Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.

  

  Daniel Burnham
  • Work
  • Long
  • High

• I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.

  

  Walter Gropius
  • Time
  • Different
  • Long

• Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

  

  Frank Gehry
  • Time
  • Architecture

• The principal element of Suprematism in painting, as in architecture, is its liberation from all social or materialist tendencies. Through Suprematism, art comes into its pure and unpolluted form. It has acknowledged the decisive fact of the nonobjective character of sensibility. It is no longer concerned with illusion.

  

  Kazimir Malevich
  • Art
  • Character
  • Painting

• Cary Grant and I were doing a play in New York. He had a crush on me. Whenever we went to a party, he would always sit on the floor beside me. I thought that was kind of beautiful, like that's where he wanted to be.

  

  Fay Wray
  • Beautiful
  • Party
  • Thought

• No one has any license to brag because he is honest. That should be natural instinct and, besides, if you are not, they put you in jail. Honesty is merely a form of insurance.

  

  Charles Comiskey
  • Honesty
  • Insurance

• The nightingale has a lyre of gold, The lark's is a clarion call, And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, But I love him best of all. For his song is all the joy of life, And we in the mad spring weather, We two have listened till he sang Our hearts and lips together.

  

  William Ernest Henley
  • Life
  • Joy
  • Best

• I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

  

  David Shields
  • Architecture