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" I argued strongly to the American publisher that 'Reality Hunger' should come out first. They thought that 'The Thing About Life' would have more appeal because it's on a broader topic; it's about mortality rather than art. "

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" 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. "

David Shields

Natural Beauty

Beauty

Try

" I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother? "

" 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. "

" I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. "

" We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums. "

" All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in. "

" All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies. "

" 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. "

David Shields

Life

War

" 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. "

" A book makes claims of literary art. "

" 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

Pretending

Years

" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "

David Shields

People

Bore

" When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture. "

" 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. "

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

David Shields

Seattle

Shaped

" The only rule is never be bored. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled. "

" 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. "

" 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'. "

David Shields

My Life

Someone