Best 22 quotes of David Shields on MyQuotes

David Shields

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

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

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    Genre is a minimum security prison.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    I don’t know what’s the matter with me, why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    My medium is prose, not the novel.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I've ever wanted.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

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

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic-not the actual thing, but the imprint of it.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.

  • By Anonym
    David Shields

    With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

  • By Anonym
    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.