QUOTES by David Shields
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes.
Quote by -David Shields
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -David Shields
Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -David Shields
Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -David Shields
Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
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'.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
Quote by -David Shields
I'm really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields
The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.
Quote by -David Shields
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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -David Shields