QUOTES by David Shields
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.
Quote by -David Shields
You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
Quote by -David Shields
Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.
Quote by -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.'
Quote by -David Shields
I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.
Quote by -David Shields
Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.
Quote by -David Shields
I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
Quote by -David Shields
The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
Quote by -David Shields
I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.
Quote by -David Shields
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields