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" 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
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" 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. "
David Shields
Fiction
Did
Many
" All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies. "
David Shields
Mortal
Human Beings
Human
" 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
" Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways. "
David Shields
Me
Seattle
Shaped
" 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
" I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation. "
David Shields
Transformation
Believe
Fair
" Good poets borrow; great poets steal. "
David Shields
Steal
Poets
Great
" I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words. "
David Shields
Words
Culture
Think
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "
David Shields
Times
Live
Like
" 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 am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. "
David Shields
Architecture
Memoir
I Am
" Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. "
David Shields
Hidden
Dancing
Tongue
" Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown. "
David Shields
Up
Winning
Through
" 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
" 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 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. "
David Shields
Free
Want
College
" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "
David Shields
People
Bore
Like
" A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion. "
David Shields
Character
Kind
Mood
" All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in. "
David Shields
Teeth
Books
Good
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Lazy
Fast
Silly
" Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any. "
David Shields
Events
Our
Real
" I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry. "
David Shields
About
Life
Tapestry
" That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life. "
David Shields
Why
Conversation
Life
" Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating. "
David Shields
Way
Honesty Is
Honesty