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" New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and - possessing a vision unhumbled by technology - use them to disassemble/recreate the Web. "

David Shields

Web

Technology

New

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

" In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast. "

David Shields

Pretending

Years

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

People

Page

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

David Shields

Seattle

Shaped

" 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. "

" Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face. "

David Shields

Blue

Talking

" 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. "

" 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

" Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. "

" 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. "

" Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown. "

David Shields

Winning

Through

" Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form. "

David Shields

Science

Popular

" The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network. "

" 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. "

" The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity. "

" 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.' "

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

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

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