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" All art is theft. "
David Shields
Theft
Art
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" 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
Blue
Me
Talking
" 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. "
David Shields
Country
Truth
Strange
" 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'. "
David Shields
Some
Stories
Those
" I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is. "
David Shields
Life
Love
Investigation
" 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
Thinking
People
Improvement
" All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies. "
David Shields
Mortal
Human Beings
Human
" Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways. "
David Shields
Me
Seattle
Shaped
" 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. "
David Shields
Jewish
Here
City
" 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
Us
America
Black
" I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form. "
David Shields
Bored
Form
Am
" 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. "
David Shields
Media
Personal
Audience
" Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs. "
David Shields
Yourself
Dangerous
Art
" I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos. "
David Shields
War
Almost
Seeing
" 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
Worry
Writing
Art
" 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. "
David Shields
Risk
Talk
Hunger
" I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful. "
David Shields
Think
Without
Hateful
" The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority. "
David Shields
Only
Authority
Fan
" 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
Talk
Ice
Girl
" 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. "
David Shields
Early
Late
Three
" I like art with a visible string to the world. "
David Shields
String
Visible
World
" A book makes claims of literary art. "
David Shields
Makes
Book
Claims
" 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
Pretend
Basketball
Know
" 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
Black
White
Life
" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "
David Shields
Judge
Our
Performing
" 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. "
David Shields
American
Place
Within
" 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
Me
Pretending
Years
" All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in. "
David Shields
Teeth
Books
Good
" 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. "
David Shields
Back
Slow
Best
" 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. "
David Shields
Sin
Slavery
America
" The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture. "
David Shields
Northwest
Nature
Mythology