David Shields Quotes
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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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Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
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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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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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I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.
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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 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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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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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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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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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 am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker.
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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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I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
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All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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I like art with a visible string to the world.
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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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Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form.