Top 158 Quotes & Sayings by David Shields

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author David Shields.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

David Shields is an American writer and filmmaker. He is the author of twenty-two books, including Reality Hunger and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead and the director of Lynch: A History. Shields’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, and dozens of other publications.

American - Author | Born: July 22, 1956

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like art with a visible string to the world.

David Shields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We hunger for connection to a larger community.

David Shields

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

David Shields

Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.

David Shields

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

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

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 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Shields

All art is theft.

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

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

David Shields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

David Shields

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

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

I'm a sucker for sports movies.

David Shields

A book makes claims of literary art.

David Shields

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

David Shields