David Shields Quotes
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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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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'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.
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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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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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I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.
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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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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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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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As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
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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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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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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 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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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.
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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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Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
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We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
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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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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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Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.
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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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I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother?