Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Me
History
Him
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
YouTube
Own
Now
" 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. "
David Shields
You
Writing
Hate
" 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
Up
Thought
" 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
" The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture. "
David Shields
Northwest
Nature
Mythology
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Natural Beauty
Beauty
Try
" Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful. "
David Shields
Simple
Life
Beautiful
" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "
David Shields
Judge
Our
Performing
" 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
" 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
" As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. "
David Shields
Work
Breaks
Embarrassing
" You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about? "
David Shields
Trouble
Life
Think
" We hunger for connection to a larger community. "
David Shields
Larger
Hunger
Connection
" 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
" The 'Times' is understood to be almost the unofficial biographer of the country, in some strange way to be printing a kind of quasi-neutral truth or even, in some people's minds, slightly center-left version of reality. "
David Shields
Country
Truth
Strange
" 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. "
David Shields
Media
Personal
Audience
" A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion. "
David Shields
Character
Kind
Mood
" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "
David Shields
People
Bore
Like
" I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world. "
David Shields
Experience
Our
Want
" I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form. "
David Shields
Bored
Form
Am
" 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
" 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
" I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most passionate thing I did was attend University of Iowa basketball games. "
David Shields
Basketball
School
Passionate
" In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since. "
David Shields
Early
Late
Three
" Seattle's not a particularly Jewish city, and I'm not in any way religious. Since I've been here, I've been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer. "
David Shields
Jewish
Here
City
" Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture: to reflect back its 'whatness,' refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness. "
David Shields
Reflect
Kind
Through
" One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time. "
David Shields
Time
Myself
Mother