Top 158 Quotes & Sayings by David Shields - Page 3

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

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

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.

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'.

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

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

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.

Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I've ever wanted.

I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.

In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic-not the actual thing, but the imprint of it.

If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

You're one of 6.5 billion people now on the planet, and 99.9 percent of your genes are the same as everyone else's.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.

A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

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.

Genre is a minimum security prison.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.