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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos. "

" I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world. "

" The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. "

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

" I argued strongly to the American publisher that 'Reality Hunger' should come out first. They thought that 'The Thing About Life' would have more appeal because it's on a broader topic; it's about mortality rather than art. "

" I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. "

" We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. "

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

" I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful. "

" Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. "

" 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

" From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched. "

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