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" 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. "
David Shields
Up
Winning
Through
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" Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age. "
David Shields
They Say
Work
Age
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Angry
White
Rich
" Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. "
David Shields
Worst
Self
Quality
" 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. "
David Shields
Person
Book
Know
" I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry. "
David Shields
About
Life
Tapestry
" Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes. "
David Shields
Nature
Narrative
Along
" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "
David Shields
Judge
Our
Performing
" I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said. "
David Shields
Everything
Disagree
Ever
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Studying
Good
Time
" I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. "
David Shields
Architecture
Memoir
I Am
" A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. "
David Shields
Focus
Lie
Lying
" I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me. "
David Shields
Trying
Stand
Myself
" You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about? "
David Shields
Trouble
Life
Think
" What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011. "
David Shields
Against
Today
Understand
" 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
" Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled. "
David Shields
Disabled
Sink
Kitchen
" I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence. "
David Shields
Join
Want
Me
" 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. "
David Shields
Web
Technology
New
" All art is theft. "
David Shields
Theft
Art
" During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial. "
David Shields
Difference
Up
Thought
" 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. "
David Shields
Scheme
You
Life
" We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums. "
David Shields
Drums
Been
Art
" A book makes claims of literary art. "
David Shields
Makes
Book
Claims
" 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. "
David Shields
Time
Myself
Mother
" 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. "
David Shields
Basketball
School
Passionate
" The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity. "
David Shields
Earth
Sports
Song
" 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
" I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker. "
David Shields
Work
Me
I Am