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" Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful. "
David Shields
Simple
Life
Beautiful
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" Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible. "
David Shields
Accessible
Straightforward
Reality
" 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
" 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
" The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition. "
David Shields
Burden
Explore
Our
" I'm a sucker for sports movies. "
David Shields
Movies
Sucker
Sports
" 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
" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "
David Shields
People
Bore
Like
" 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
" I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos. "
David Shields
War
Almost
Seeing
" 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
" 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
" I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom. "
David Shields
Begin
Think
New
" As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. "
David Shields
Work
Breaks
Embarrassing
" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "
David Shields
Times
Live
Like
" 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. "
David Shields
Lazy
Fast
Silly
" 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
" Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly. "
David Shields
Novel
Just
Basic
" 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. "
David Shields
Studying
Good
Time
" 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. "
David Shields
Doubt
Experience
Love
" You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing. "
David Shields
Book
Amazing
You
" Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any. "
David Shields
Events
Our
Real
" In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible. "
David Shields
Creativity
Plagiarism
Many
" 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. "
David Shields
Risk
Talk
Hunger
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
David Shields
Angry
White
Rich
" Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. "
David Shields
Worst
Self
Quality
" 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
" A book makes claims of literary art. "
David Shields
Makes
Book
Claims
" 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