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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.
David Shields -
A book makes claims of literary art.
David Shields
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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.
David Shields -
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
David Shields -
The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields
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A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown.
David Shields
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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.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.
David Shields -
You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
David Shields -
We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.
David Shields -
I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
David Shields
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Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields -
Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market.
David Shields -
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.
David Shields