David Shields Quotes
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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 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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A book makes claims of literary art.
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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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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 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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Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.
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I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty.
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Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
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I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
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I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
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I like art with a visible string to the world.
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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 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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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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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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The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.
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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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I think the core of fans' relationship is one that vacillates schizophrenically and mercurially from reverence to resentment. Fans fetishize the players' athletic genius and both deify it and demonize it; witness the way awe turns into anger whenever a player holds out or flips off the offensive coordinator.
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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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I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
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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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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 felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.