David Shields Quotes
In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
Quotes to Explore
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Let me just say as one who has been speaker of the House, I've had to have a very thick skin about every kind of thing that was thrown at me.
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I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.
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There is no problem that is not improved by effort, and no effort that is too paltry to be worth undertaking.
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I never feel there's anything I can't do.
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I think that when you don't look at the good things around you, that you lose sight of all those good things. And you're not going to enjoy your life.
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Looking back, the biggest mistake I made was feeling ashamed of it. Acne is a part of life. You don't need to be embarrassed of it.
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It's a great feat for me to have broken my world record.
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Dancing has always been a passion of mine.
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It was a small provincial place with great people and I had a happy childhood growing up in Queens.
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Your former Fathers the Spaniards have now no further Authority over you.
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There's no smarter politician out there than Bill Clinton.
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Unlike most major American cities, Honolulu is geographically insulated from the rest of the country. When disaster strikes we cannot call on neighboring states for assistance.
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I'll talk about these things, but it's just, you know, you only get so much time and I'm much more interested in what I'm going to be doing next year than in something I did 10 years ago.
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If it's accessible by hundreds of millions of people, then it's as mainstream as it gets.
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When you take a shower in space, you have to press the water onto your body to clean yourself, and then you gotta vacuum it off.
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The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness.
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There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.
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You know, my mum's always encouraged me and never made my gender an issue, I guess. She brought me up to believe in equality, as opposed to feminism or sexism – so it just meant that my gender was not relevant to what I was capable of achieving.
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'Smoke Ring' was a downer, then 'Wakin' was an upturn.
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Writing plays fast and loose with the past.
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Having read my share of tell-alls over the year, including some that were passed off as autobiographies, I mostly feel sad - sometimes for the writer and sometimes for all the people in his way. I hope that the process of writing the tell-all gives some release and closure on what clearly was an unpleasant and unfulfilling life experience.
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I enjoy building more than managing.
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Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
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In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
