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" I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller. "
David Shields
My Life
Life
Story
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies. "
David Shields
Mortal
Human Beings
Human
" 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
" In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible. "
David Shields
Creativity
Plagiarism
Many
" 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. "
David Shields
Lived
Life
Art
" 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. "
David Shields
Level
Good
Enough
" 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 want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence. "
David Shields
Join
Want
Me
" 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
" 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
" 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
" When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise. "
David Shields
More
Content
Might
" 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'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
" 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
" The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. "
David Shields
American
Writer
Trying
" Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt. "
David Shields
Doubt
Experience
Love
" The only rule is never be bored. "
David Shields
Bored
Only
Never
" 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
" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "
David Shields
People
Bore
Like
" Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful. "
David Shields
Simple
Life
Beautiful
" Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer. "
David Shields
Become
Both
Parents
" 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. "
David Shields
Black
Think
Never
" I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write. "
David Shields
Want
Pay
Rent
" 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
" I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. "
David Shields
Alive
Work
Want
" Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat. "
David Shields
Straightforward
Nostalgia
Bubble
" I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing. "
David Shields
Me
Three
Want
" 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