Quotes from David Shields

Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule.

The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.

Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.

I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother?

Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown.

Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.

Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful.

Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.

As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.

I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.

I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.

A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network.

I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker.

Sports - especially the NBA - function as a place where American society pretends to discuss and pretends to solve questions and historical agonies that can't possibly be solved within the realm of sports.

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

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.

So many of the things I talk about in 'Reality Hunger' seem to be the things that 'The Thing About Life' does - things like risk, contradiction, compression, mixing modes of attack from the memoristic gesture to data-crunching.