David Shields Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

My father reminds me that according to Midrash - the ever-evolving commentary upon the Hebrew scriptures - when you arrive in the world as a baby, your hands are clenched, as though to say, "Everything is mine. I will inherit it all." When you depart from the world, your hands are open, as though to say, "I have acquired nothing from the world.

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

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.

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

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.

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".

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

Genre is a minimum security prison,

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

Deep down, you know you're him.

You want to put in a little bit of David - the safe part of David - the David that you wouldn't be afraid to show anybody, but there is a David that you don't want to be in the film, and that's what you should try to put in, if you don't dare face yourself other ways. Confess things to the camera. Say the things you're most ashamed of, things you don't want to remember, things you don't want anybody to know. Maybe that way there'll be some truth.

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

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

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.

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.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

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.

He who follows another will never overtake him.

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.

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

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.

What if America isn't really the sort of place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead it's the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed?

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

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

IT'S HARDLY a coincidence that "Shipping Out," Wallace's most well-known essay, appeared only a month before Infinite Jest, his most well-known novel, was published. Both are about the same thing (amusing ourselves to death), with different governing données (lethally entertaining movie, lethally pampering leisure cruise). In an interview after the novel came out, Wallace, asked what's so great about writing, said that we're existentially alone on the planet - I can't know what you're thinking and feeling, and you can't know what I'm thinking and feeling - so writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the bridge of human loneliness.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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,