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" 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. "

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" 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. "

David Shields

They Say

Work

Age

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Good poets borrow; great poets steal. "

" 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. "

" 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

America

Black

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

" Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic. "

" 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. "

" It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's. "

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

David Shields

Times

Live

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He's not really bad. He's only pretend bad - I know that - but he allows me to fantasize about being bad. "

" I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is. "

" 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. "

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

" Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled. "

" I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" We hunger for connection to a larger community. "

" Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market. "