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" 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. "

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" 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

" I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said. "

" 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. "

" Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. "

" I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos. "

" The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms. "

David Shields

Literature

Key

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

" The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity. "

" I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive. "

" I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful. "

" The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. "

" 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 really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now. "

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

" 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. "

" Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state's team beat your city-state's team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this. "

" Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. "

" 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? "

" 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

" 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. "

" Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer. "

" The only rule is never be bored. "

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

" Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer. "

" 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. "

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

" The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network. "

" 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