David Shields Quotes
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I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.
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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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All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
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People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.
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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.
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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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Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
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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.
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We hunger for connection to a larger community.
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As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
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Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.
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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.
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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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Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
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We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
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Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
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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 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.
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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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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.
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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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Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
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Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown.
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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.