David Shields Quotes & Sayings

Deep down, you know you're him. — David Shields

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Still (very still), at the heart of "literary culture" is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four-hundred-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that. — David Shields

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things. — David Shields

Candor is key - being willing to say what no one else is willing to say. — David Shields

I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative. — David Shields

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative. — David Shields

In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward. — David Shields

I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor. — David Shields

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps. — David Shields

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can't be copyrighted. — David Shields

Genre is a minimum security prison, — David Shields

The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it - — David Shields

Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances. — David Shields

Let a man go to the bottom of what he is and believe in that. — David Shields

To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality. — David Shields

When will you stop laughing at misery? I'm so sick and tired of your pseudo-strength. All I want you to do is laugh at what is funny and cry at what isn't, but you won't do that, will you? — David Shields

I'm not interested in myself per se. I'm interested in myself as theme carrier, as host. — David Shields

Think it's a poetry that comes out of the stuff of the poet's personal life, but he's trying to render this experience in more general and inclusive, or what used to be called universal, — David Shields

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any, — David Shields

Anything processed by memory is fiction. — David Shields

Samuel Johnson: A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it . — David Shields

My medium is prose, not the novel. — David Shields

No one was dancing, least of all us, because I don't dance in public. My body's a private thing; it doesn't belong to the world at large. — David Shields

A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone. — David Shields

I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique. — David Shields

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data. — David Shields

Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I've ever wanted. — David Shields

Every work, no matter how short or antilinear, needs momentum; — David Shields

We are all getting tired of the Village Explainers. Explanations don't seem to be explaining very much anymore. Authoritative accounts have a way of looking like official lies, which in their solemnity start to sound funny. — David Shields

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn't. — David Shields

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom. — David Shields

What is true for you in your private heart is true for all men. — David Shields

To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil. — David Shields

He who follows another will never overtake him. — David Shields

Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic-not the actual thing, but the imprint of it. — David Shields

You want to put in a little bit of David - the safe part of David - the David that you wouldn't be afraid to show anybody, but there is a David that you don't want to be in the film, and that's what you should try to put in, if you don't dare face yourself other ways. Confess things to the camera. Say the things you're most ashamed of, things you don't want to remember, things you don't want anybody to know. Maybe that way there'll be some truth. — David Shields

I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this
which is wha makes it essential. — David Shields

You're one of 6.5 billion people now on the planet, and 99.9 percent of your genes are the same as everyone else's. — David Shields

Every man has within himself the entire human condition. — David Shields

My father reminds me that according to Midrash - the ever-evolving commentary upon the Hebrew scriptures - when you arrive in the world as a baby, your hands are clenched, as though to say, "Everything is mine. I will inherit it all." When you depart from the world, your hands are open, as though to say, "I have acquired nothing from the world. — David Shields

Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. — David Shields

Beyond the edge of town, past tar-covered poor houses and a low hill bare except for fallen electric poles, was the institution and it sent its delicate and isolated buildings trembling over the gravel and cinder floor of the valley. — David Shields

I'm interested in knowing the secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets are the same. — David Shields

Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he'd have drown himself at high tide. My sister- so shy, so sincere- once wanted to be an actress. The best jazz drummer I've ever heard had only one arm. We all choose a calling that's the most radical contradiction of ourselves. — David Shields

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art". — David Shields

I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious. — David Shields

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot. — David Shields

If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress. — David Shields

We're only certain ("certain only"?) about what we don't understand. — David Shields

The target of Melanie Thernstrom's The Dead Girl is, I think, an interesting one: — David Shields