David Shields Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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'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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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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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 do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
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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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Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
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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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Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
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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 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 like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.
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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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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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The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.
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Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
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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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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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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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I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.