David Shields

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

“When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.”

“The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.”

“I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.”

“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'.”

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

“I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.”

“We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.”

“Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state's team beat your city-state's team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this.”

“My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He's not really bad. He's only pretend bad - I know that - but he allows me to fantasize about being bad.”

“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.”

“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.”