Quotes from David Shields

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.

During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial.

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

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.

All art is theft.

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

Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized.

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.

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

Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.

I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects.

We hunger for connection to a larger community.

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 think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words.

I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.

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.

You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?