David Shields Quotes
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All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
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What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.
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When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
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My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He's not really bad. He's only pretend bad - I know that - but he allows me to fantasize about being bad.
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Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.
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The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.
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I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
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Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
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From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched.
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Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
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Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
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You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing.
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We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
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A book makes claims of literary art.
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I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.
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As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
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In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.
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I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.
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We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.
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The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.
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Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market.
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The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.
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Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face.
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Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.