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" Sports - especially the NBA - function as a place where American society pretends to discuss and pretends to solve questions and historical agonies that can't possibly be solved within the realm of sports. "

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" 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

" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "

David Shields

Times

Live

" A book makes claims of literary art. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words. "

" 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. "

" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "

David Shields

People

Bore

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise. "

David Shields

Content

Might

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

" 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. "

" 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

" Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Good poets borrow; great poets steal. "

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

" 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. "

" A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion. "

" 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. "

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

" You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter. We're vectors on the grids of cellular life. "

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

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

" I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation. "

" 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 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.' "