David Shields Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by 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
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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
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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
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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
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Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.
~David Shields
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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.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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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.
~David Shields
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I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
~David Shields
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Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
~David Shields
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Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes.
~David Shields
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I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
~David Shields
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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
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Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic.
~David Shields
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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.
~David Shields
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We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
~David Shields
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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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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
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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.
~David Shields
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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
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I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects.
~David Shields
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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
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All art is theft.
~David Shields
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Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
~David Shields
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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
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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.
~David Shields
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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.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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The only rule is never be bored.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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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
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I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.
~David Shields
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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.
~David Shields
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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
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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.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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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.
~David Shields
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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
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I'm a sucker for sports movies.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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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.
~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
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Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.
~David Shields
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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
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Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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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
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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
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All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
~David Shields
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Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule.
~David Shields
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We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.
~David Shields
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I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
~David Shields
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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.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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A book makes claims of literary art.
~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
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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
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I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
~David Shields
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All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
~David Shields
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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
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The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.
~David Shields
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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.
~David Shields
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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.
~David Shields
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We hunger for connection to a larger community.
~David Shields
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When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
~David Shields
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I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.
~David Shields
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Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.
~David Shields
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Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
~David Shields
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I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
~David Shields
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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
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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
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I like art with a visible string to the world.
~David Shields
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As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
~David Shields
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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
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Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
~David Shields
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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
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The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
~David Shields
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Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
~David Shields
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