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" 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. "

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" 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. "

David Shields

Culture

Violence

Language

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

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

" 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. "

" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "

" The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional. "

" I like art with a visible string to the world. "

" 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. "

" Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible. "

" Swimming is by far the best tonic I've found for my back. I'm not a good swimmer - I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs. "

" Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes. "

" I'm really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now. "

" 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

" I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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.' "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

" Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it. "

David Shields

I Can

Stand