David Shields Quotes
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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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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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Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
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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 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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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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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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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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Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
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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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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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I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
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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 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 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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I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
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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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A book makes claims of literary art.
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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.