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" 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. "

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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

Winning

Through

" 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. "

" I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom. "

" The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority. "

" I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation. "

" A book makes claims of literary art. "

" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "

" I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller. "

" 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. "

David Shields

World

" 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

Thought

" 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

America

Black

" 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.' "

" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "

David Shields

Times

Live

" It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's. "

" 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. "

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

" The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. "

" 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. "

" Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible. "

" The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses. "

" 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. "

" I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects. "

" In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible. "

" The only rule is never be bored. "

" Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways. "

David Shields

Seattle

Shaped

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat. "

" I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. "