Quotes from David Shields

The center of the artistic process—for me—is the attempt to transform a particular feeling, insight, sorrow into a metaphor and then make that metaphor ramify so it holds everything, everything in the world.

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

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

Deep down, you know you're him.

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

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.

Painting isn't dead. The novel isn't dead. They just aren't as central to the culture as they once were.

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

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

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means.

autobiography is concerned with the consciousness of its creator in the process of creating himself.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Capitalism implies and induces insecurity, which is constantly being exploited, of course, by all sorts of people selling things.

Is it possible that contemporary literary prizes are a bit like the federal bailout package, subsidizing work that is no longer remotely describing reality?

Ne düÅŸündüÄŸünü, ne hissettiÄŸini bilmem mümkün deÄŸil, sen de benim ne düÅŸündüÄŸümü ve hissettiÄŸimi bilemezsin. Yazmak bu yüzden, en iyi ihtimalle, insan?n yaln?zl???na doÄŸru uzanan bir köprü inÅŸa etmektir.

I admire your work and was a big fan of your lecture, so the misunderstanding between us is particularly painful to me. I take these issues very seriously and am, I think, alert to nuances in this regard, as I hope my work demonstrates.

Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immorality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and eerily beautiful.

Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility)

Il progresso della crescita artistica in molti media viene rallentato, come quei poveri alberi sui rilievi alpini che possono crescere solo di pochi centimetri per qualche settimana all'anno. Per gli scrittori e gli artisti che sono cresciuti in mezzo a caterve di artefatti e frammenti culturali, tutto questo fa parte della loro vita, ma quasi tutto è off-limit sul piano dell'espressione artistica perché è di «proprietà» di qualcuno.

want to cut to the absolute bone.

In the case of the Web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience - a few more people slide through the door - but Facebook is finally a crude, personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.

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.

In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast.

In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.