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" I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'. "

David Shields

Some

Stories

Those

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" We hunger for connection to a larger community. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture. "

" Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form. "

David Shields

Science

Popular

" Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Talking

" 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. "

" 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? "

" Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful. "

" 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

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

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

" The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network. "

" I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros. "

" The N.F.L.'s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit. "

" 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 just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

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