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" 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
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" The only rule is never be bored. "
David Shields
Bored
Only
Never
" 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
" 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 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Trying
Stand
Myself
" I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books. "
David Shields
Read
Other
Just
" Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any. "
David Shields
Events
Our
Real
" 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. "
David Shields
Lived
Life
Art
" From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life. "
David Shields
Me
Life
War
" I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. "
David Shields
Architecture
Memoir
I Am
" When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise. "
David Shields
More
Content
Might
" 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
Us
America
Black
" 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. "
David Shields
Talk
Ice
Girl
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Team
Passion
Better
" Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do. "
David Shields
Thinking
People
Improvement
" I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects. "
David Shields
Bee
Selfish
Just
" 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
" When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture. "
David Shields
City
You
New York
" 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
" 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
" Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever. "
David Shields
Work
Cut
Writer
" New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and - possessing a vision unhumbled by technology - use them to disassemble/recreate the Web. "
David Shields
Web
Technology
New
" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "
David Shields
Times
Live
Like
" 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. "
David Shields
World
Crazy
People
" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "
David Shields
Judge
Our
Performing
" 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. "
David Shields
Anger
Think
Relationship
" The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses. "
David Shields
Animal
Apology
Our
" The ways in which I was obsessed with Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp 20 years ago is completely replicated by my daughters' and my crush on Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman now. "
David Shields
Gary
Years
Crush
" 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