Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" I'm obviously aware that most people don't agree with me, that people like to escape into a coherent world that is apart from their own. "

David Shields

World

" 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. "

" 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? "

" A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. "

" 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 like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense. "

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

" 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. "

" Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful. "

" 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

" 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

" Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any. "

" Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. "

" Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical. "

" Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing. "

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

" 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. "

" Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age. "

" I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X. "

" 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. "

" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses. "

" 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