David Shields Quotes
-
Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
-
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
-
I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.
-
You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter. We're vectors on the grids of cellular life.
-
When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly.
-
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.
-
Seattle is still more Caucasian than most medium-sized cities. The sort of psychosexual politics of white fandom in context of black athletes who are also both very rich and slightly angry is just, to me, bottomlessly fascinating.
-
In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast.
-
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
-
I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.
-
You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
-
I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
-
I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.
-
A book makes claims of literary art.
-
I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros.
-
I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
-
A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
-
I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
-
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
-
One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time.
-
When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.