David Shields Quotes
-
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
-
I'm really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
-
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 am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
-
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
-
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
-
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.
-
I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.
-
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?
-
You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.