David Shields Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

You're one of 6.5 billion people now on the planet, and 99.9 percent of your genes are the same as everyone else's.

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

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.

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.

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".

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

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

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.

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.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

Genre is a minimum security prison.

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

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

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

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

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

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

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

My medium is prose, not the novel.