David Shields Quotes
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Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.
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All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
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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.
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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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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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I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
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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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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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Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
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The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.
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Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
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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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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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Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
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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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We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
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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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I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words.
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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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The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time.
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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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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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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.