David Shields Quotes

When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.

- David Shields

The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.

- David Shields

Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating.

- David Shields

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.

- David Shields

We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.

- David Shields

The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects.

- David Shields

I'm a sucker for sports movies.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.

- 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

The ways in which I was obsessed with Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp 20 years ago is completely replicated by my daughters' and my crush on Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman now.

- David Shields

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

- 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

In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.

- David Shields

A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years.

- David Shields

New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and - possessing a vision unhumbled by technology - use them to disassemble/recreate the Web.

- David Shields

I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.

- David Shields

I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

- David Shields

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'

- David Shields

The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network.

- David Shields

In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.

- David Shields

Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.

- David Shields

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

- David Shields

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

- David Shields

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

- David Shields

The N.F.L.'s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit.

- David Shields

I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.

- David Shields

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.

- 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

Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.

- David Shields

The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.

- David Shields

I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.

- David Shields

In the case of the Web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience - a few more people slide through the door - but Facebook is finally a crude, personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.

- David Shields

Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.

- David Shields

Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.

- David Shields

The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.

- David Shields

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

- David Shields

Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.

- David Shields

I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.

- David Shields

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

- David Shields

You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast.

- David Shields

The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time.

- David Shields

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

I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most passionate thing I did was attend University of Iowa basketball games.

- David Shields

I argued strongly to the American publisher that 'Reality Hunger' should come out first. They thought that 'The Thing About Life' would have more appeal because it's on a broader topic; it's about mortality rather than art.

- David Shields

I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

- David Shields

We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.

- David Shields

I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.

- David Shields

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

- David Shields

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

- David Shields

If the bus driver is black, I thank him... when I get off at my spot, whereas I would never think of doing this if the driver were white.

- David Shields

The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros.

- David Shields

Sports - especially the NBA - function as a place where American society pretends to discuss and pretends to solve questions and historical agonies that can't possibly be solved within the realm of sports.

- 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

To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.

- David Shields

The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.

- David Shields

The 'Times' is understood to be almost the unofficial biographer of the country, in some strange way to be printing a kind of quasi-neutral truth or even, in some people's minds, slightly center-left version of reality.

- David Shields

From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.

- David Shields

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.

- 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

I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.

- 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

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

That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life.

- David Shields

I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.

- David Shields

As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.

- David Shields

The only rule is never be bored.

- David Shields

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

- David Shields

I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.

- David Shields

Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

- David Shields

What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.

- David Shields

A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.

- David Shields

Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.

- David Shields

Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful.

- David Shields

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

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

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

- David Shields

I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.

- David Shields

We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.

- David Shields

Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes.

- David Shields

In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.

- 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

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

- David Shields

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?

- David Shields

I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.

- David Shields

The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.

- David Shields

A book makes claims of literary art.

- David Shields

You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter. We're vectors on the grids of cellular life.

- David Shields

My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He's not really bad. He's only pretend bad - I know that - but he allows me to fantasize about being bad.

- David Shields

The originating sin of America is slavery, for which reparations should be paid and will never be paid; as a result, mini-reparations are paid daily, and the NBA remains, for me, reparations theater.

- David Shields

Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.

- 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

It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people.

- David Shields

We hunger for connection to a larger community.

- David Shields

So many of the things I talk about in 'Reality Hunger' seem to be the things that 'The Thing About Life' does - things like risk, contradiction, compression, mixing modes of attack from the memoristic gesture to data-crunching.

- David Shields

Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.

- David Shields

I'm really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now.

- David Shields

When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.

- David Shields

Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.

- David Shields

All art is theft.

- David Shields

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

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

- David Shields

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.

- David Shields

I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.

- David Shields

Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized.

- David Shields

I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.

- 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

Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule.

- David Shields

The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.

- David Shields

You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing.

- David Shields

I like art with a visible string to the world.

- 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

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.

- David Shields

I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.

- David Shields

Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs.

- David Shields

Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.

- David Shields