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" 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. "

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" I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most passionate thing I did was attend University of Iowa basketball games. "

David Shields

Basketball

School

Passionate

" 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. "

" When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture. "

" 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. "

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

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

" A book makes claims of literary art. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible. "

" 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

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

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

" Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer. "

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

" 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. "

" As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. "

" 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. "

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

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

David Shields

People

Bore

" When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly. "

" 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. "

" During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial. "

David Shields

Difference

Thought

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

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

" Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do. "

" 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. "

" 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 like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'. "