Quotes from David Shields

The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition.

Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes.

It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people.

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.

The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.

The ways in which I was obsessed with Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp 20 years ago is completely replicated by my daughters' and my crush on Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman now.

I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros.

The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional.

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched.

Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.

In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years.

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

That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life.

We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.

To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'.

When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly.

I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.

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

When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

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

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