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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From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched.
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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'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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
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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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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 believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
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The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.
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Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
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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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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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I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.