David Shields Quotes
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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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A book makes claims of literary art.
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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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Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
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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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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 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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You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing.
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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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Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
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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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Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
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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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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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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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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.
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I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
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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.
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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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Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
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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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During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial.
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I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.