David Shields Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.
-
Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
-
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.
-
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
-
I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people.
-
We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
-
Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.
-
Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.
-
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.
-
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.