Top 75 David Shields Quotes

All art is theft.

I’m a sucker for sports movies.

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’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.

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.

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’m very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.

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

The movie – any sports movie – becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.

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.

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

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

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.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

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.

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.

What I’m definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that’s still being written today. I just don’t understand why you’d read or write that in 2011.

We’ve been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we’ve been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.

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.

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.

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.

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.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

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

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.

Reality isn’t straightforward or easily accessible.

If the bus driver is black, I thank him… when I get off at my spot, whereas I would never think of doing this if the driver were white.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

We hunger for connection to a larger community.

The N.F.L.’s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit.

Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.

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.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing ‘The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead’, and I find I can’t.

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

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.

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.

The ‘Times’ is understood to be almost the unofficial biographer of the country, in some strange way to be printing a kind of quasi-neutral truth or even, in some people’s minds, slightly center-left version of reality.

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.

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

I felt like I was definitely seeing something – the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in ‘Times’ combat photos.

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.

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.

I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.

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.

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 ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

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.

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.

Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state’s team beat your city-state’s team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this.

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.

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.