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" I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects. "
David Shields
Bee
Selfish
Just
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" 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
" You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing. "
David Shields
Book
Amazing
You
" A book makes claims of literary art. "
David Shields
Makes
Book
Claims
" Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic. "
David Shields
Movies
Sports
Very
" 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 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. "
David Shields
Culture
Violence
Language
" Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. "
David Shields
Hidden
Dancing
Tongue
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Book
Back
Problem
" 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 try to be as honest as I possibly can about the contradictions within my own heart and thereby get to something 'true' and revealing and important about contemporary American culture and human nature. "
David Shields
Heart
American
True
" 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
More
Literature
Key
" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "
David Shields
People
Bore
Like
" 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
" As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. "
David Shields
Work
Breaks
Embarrassing
" 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
" 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
" Swimming is by far the best tonic I've found for my back. I'm not a good swimmer - I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it. "
David Shields
Back
Slow
Best
" 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
" The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. "
David Shields
Cling
Fervently
Novel
" In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward. "
David Shields
Music
Forward
Royalty
" When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly. "
David Shields
Studying
Good
Time
" Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs. "
David Shields
Yourself
Dangerous
Art
" 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. "
David Shields
Create
Own
Path
" 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
" 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
" 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
Me
Pretending
Years
" 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
" Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. "
David Shields
Nothing
Ability
Changes