1.
Anything processed by memory is fiction.
David Shields
2.
My medium is prose, not the novel.
David Shields
3.
Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.
David Shields
4.
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
5.
A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.
David Shields
6.
To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.
David Shields
7.
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
8.
Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.
David Shields
9.
The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
David Shields
10.
Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.
David Shields
11.
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
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.
Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
David Shields
14.
Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.
David Shields
15.
With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.
David Shields
16.
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
17.
The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.
David Shields
18.
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.
David Shields
19.
Genre is a minimum security prison.
David Shields
20.
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
21.
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
22.
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
23.
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.
David Shields
24.
I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.
David Shields