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" 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

America

Black

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" Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways. "

David Shields

Seattle

Shaped

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

David Shields

Join

Want

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" So many of the things I talk about in 'Reality Hunger' seem to be the things that 'The Thing About Life' does - things like risk, contradiction, compression, mixing modes of attack from the memoristic gesture to data-crunching. "

" The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. "

" 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. "

" 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'. "

" 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

Life

War

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'. "

David Shields

My Life

Someone

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.' "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

" I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects. "

" The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has. "

" 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. "

" As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. "

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