Quotes from David Shields

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.

Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.

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

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.

The only rule is never be bored.

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

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

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.

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

I'm a sucker for sports movies.

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".

I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

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

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.

A book makes claims of literary art.

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

I'm obviously aware that most people don't agree with me, that people like to escape into a coherent world that is apart from their own.

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

Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.

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.

one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you're not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers, take note. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.

La trama è roba per gente morta.

aphorism—"A photograph is a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know"—

I'm drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking