A biography for David Shieldshasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“Good poets borrow; great poets steal.”
“I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.”
“I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.”
“Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.”
“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.”
“I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.”
“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.”
“The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.”
“We hunger for connection to a larger community.”
“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'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects.”
“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.”
“I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.”
“Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.”
“In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.”