Quotes from David Shields

Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he'd have drown himself at high tide. My sister- so shy, so sincere- once wanted to be an actress. The best jazz drummer I've ever heard had only one arm. We all choose a calling that's the most radical contradiction of ourselves.

My father reminds me that according to Midrash - the ever-evolving commentary upon the Hebrew scriptures - when you arrive in the world as a baby, your hands are clenched, as though to say, Everything is mine. I will inherit it all. When you depart from the world, your hands are open, as though to say, I have acquired nothing from the world.

A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.

No one was dancing, least of all us, because I don't dance in public. My body's a private thing; it doesn't belong to the world at large.

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom.

What if America isn't really the sort of place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead it's the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed?

Every work, no matter how short or antilinear, needs momentum;

He who follows another will never overtake him.

I'm interested in knowing the secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets are the same.

Candor is key—being willing to say what no one else is willing to say.

When will you stop laughing at misery? I'm so sick and tired of your pseudo-strength. All I want you to do is laugh at what is funny and cry at what isn't, but you won't do that, will you?

Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused.

To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality.

always try to read form as content, style as meaning.

The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.

What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems

Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage.

Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular personal attribute—their race, say, or sexual orientation, or even their physical beauty—are always the writers whose work (the reception to whose work) has most directly benefited from this attribute.

593 Still (very still), at the heart of "literary culture" is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four-hundred-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that.

The ancient Indian epic Mah?bh?rata asks, "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.

The 'Times' is understood to be almost the unofficial biographer of the country, in some strange way to be printing a kind of quasi-neutral truth or even, in some people's minds, slightly center-left version of reality.

Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.

The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.