David Shields
I think the core of fans' relationship is one that vacillates schizophrenically and mercurially from reverence to resentment. Fans fetishize the players' athletic genius and both deify it and demonize it; witness the way awe turns into anger whenever a player holds out or flips off the offensive coordinator.Collection: Anger
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.Collection: Architecture
I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.
Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.
Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.
We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.
Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.
Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.
In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.
Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form.
I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.
I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.
From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.
I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.
I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.
I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects.
The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty.
The only rule is never be bored.
I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.
I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.
I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.
All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.
Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.
In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.
What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.
It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people.
Seattle's not a particularly Jewish city, and I'm not in any way religious. Since I've been here, I've been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer.
I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'
I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.
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.
The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.
The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.
I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.
Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.
In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.
Swimming is by far the best tonic I've found for my back. I'm not a good swimmer - I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it.
The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.
I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.