David Shields Quotes

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

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.

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

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

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

A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

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

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".

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.

Genre is a minimum security prison.

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

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

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.

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

You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter. We're vectors on the grids of cellular life.

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

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

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

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

I'm a sucker for sports movies.

A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.

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

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