David Shields Quotes
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I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.
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Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
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I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
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The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.
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I'm really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now.
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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.
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I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
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Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs.
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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.
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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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Swimming is by far the best tonic I've found for my back. I'm not a good swimmer - I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it.
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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.
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I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
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I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
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I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.