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" 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

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" I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world. "

" We hunger for connection to a larger community. "

" I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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

" 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 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. "

" Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating. "

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

" Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it. "

David Shields

I Can

Stand

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture. "

" 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. "

" Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs. "

" From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched. "

" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "

David Shields

Times

Live

" 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. "

" 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

" I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing. "

David Shields

Three

Want

" It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people. "

" What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011. "

" I like art with a visible string to the world. "

" I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker. "

David Shields

Work

I Am

" In the case of the Web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience - a few more people slide through the door - but Facebook is finally a crude, personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away. "

" 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. "