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" I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry. "
David Shields
About
Life
Tapestry
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
David Shields
Together
Think
Bloom
" 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
" The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time. "
David Shields
Page
Time
Why
" The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority. "
David Shields
Only
Authority
Fan
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Anger
Think
Relationship
" 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
" I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is. "
David Shields
Life
Love
Investigation
" 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
" Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture: to reflect back its 'whatness,' refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness. "
David Shields
Reflect
Kind
Through
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects. "
David Shields
Bee
Selfish
Just
" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "
David Shields
Times
Live
Like
" The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional. "
David Shields
Professional
Turn
Students
" 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
" 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 just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books. "
David Shields
Read
Other
Just
" 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 really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now. "
David Shields
Live
Capture
Work
" The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling. "
David Shields
Me
People
Page
" Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly. "
David Shields
Novel
Just
Basic
" I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. "
David Shields
Architecture
Memoir
I Am