David Shields Quotes
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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 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 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 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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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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A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
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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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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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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 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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I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
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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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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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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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The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
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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 American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.
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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.
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All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
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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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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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We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.
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I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.