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" 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

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" I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is. "

" 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. "

" I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. "

" 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

Literature

Key

" 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 used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back. "

" Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market. "

" All art is theft. "

David Shields

Theft

Art

" 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 do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful. "

" 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. "

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

" You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about? "

" Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. "

" I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence. "

David Shields

Join

Want

" 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. "

" The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. "

" Seattle is still more Caucasian than most medium-sized cities. The sort of psychosexual politics of white fandom in context of black athletes who are also both very rich and slightly angry is just, to me, bottomlessly fascinating. "

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

" 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. "

" In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression. "

David Shields

History

Him

" Good poets borrow; great poets steal. "

" Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat. "

" I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry. "

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

David Shields

Times

Live

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

David Shields

I Can

Stand

" We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense. "

" 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. "

" That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life. "