David Shields Quotes

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

#4. 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?

David Shields

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

David Shields

#6. Candor is key - being willing to say what no one else is willing to say.

David Shields

#7. 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.

David Shields

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

David Shields

#9. Let a man go to the bottom of what he is and believe in that.

David Shields

#10. We are all getting tired of the Village Explainers. Explanations don't seem to be explaining very much anymore. Authoritative accounts have a way of looking like official lies, which in their solemnity start to sound funny.

David Shields

#11. 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.

David Shields

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

David Shields

#13. 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.

David Shields

#14. Beyond the edge of town, past tar-covered poor houses and a low hill bare except for fallen electric poles, was the institution and it sent its delicate and isolated buildings trembling over the gravel and cinder floor of the valley.

David Shields

#15. 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.

David Shields

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

David Shields

#17. Genre is a minimum security prison,

David Shields

#18. 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.

David Shields

#19. My medium is prose, not the novel.

David Shields

#20. Anything processed by memory is fiction.

David Shields

#21. 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.

David Shields

#22. 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.

David Shields

#23. Every man has within himself the entire human condition.

David Shields

#24. Think it's a poetry that comes out of the stuff of the poet's personal life, but he's trying to render this experience in more general and inclusive, or what used to be called universal,

David Shields

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

David Shields

#26. I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this
which is wha makes it essential.

David Shields

#27. We're only certain ("certain only"?) about what we don't understand.

David Shields

#28. Samuel Johnson: A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it .

David Shields

#29. The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it -

David Shields

#30. Deep down, you know you're him.

David Shields

#31. What is true for you in your private heart is true for all men.

David Shields

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

#38. The target of Melanie Thernstrom's The Dead Girl is, I think, an interesting one:

David Shields

#39. I'm not interested in myself per se. I'm interested in myself as theme carrier, as host.

David Shields

#40. 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.

David Shields

#41. 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.

David Shields

#42. 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".

David Shields

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

#45. He who follows another will never overtake him.

David Shields