Top 158 Quotes & Sayings by David Shields - Page 2

I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.

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.

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.

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

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.

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.

Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

The only rule is never be bored.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.

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

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

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

Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.