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The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional.
David Shields -
I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.
David Shields
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Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.
David Shields -
I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
David Shields -
I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.
David Shields -
I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.
David Shields -
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
David Shields -
Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.
David Shields
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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.
David Shields -
Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.
David Shields -
Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.
David Shields
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All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
David Shields -
Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
David Shields -
I argued strongly to the American publisher that 'Reality Hunger' should come out first. They thought that 'The Thing About Life' would have more appeal because it's on a broader topic; it's about mortality rather than art.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields
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The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
David Shields -
The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.
David Shields