David Shields Quotes
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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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Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.
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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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I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
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I'm obviously aware that most people don't agree with me, that people like to escape into a coherent world that is apart from their own.
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The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.
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Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
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All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
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I try to be as honest as I possibly can about the contradictions within my own heart and thereby get to something 'true' and revealing and important about contemporary American culture and human nature.
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The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
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A book makes claims of literary art.
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Seattle's not a particularly Jewish city, and I'm not in any way religious. Since I've been here, I've been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer.
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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'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.
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A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
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We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.
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I like art with a visible string to the world.
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I'm a sucker for sports movies.
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When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
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Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state's team beat your city-state's team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this.
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I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.
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Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture: to reflect back its 'whatness,' refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness.
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The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.
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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.