David Shields Quotes
-
I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
-
A book makes claims of literary art.
-
I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
-
All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
-
When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.
-
Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
-
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.
-
You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing.
-
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
-
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.
-
We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
-
Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
-
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.
-
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.
-
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.