David Shields > Quotes

“Anything processed by memory is fiction.”
― David Shields

“Samuel Johnson: A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it .”
― David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life

“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, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“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.”
― David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life

“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.”
― David Shields, The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

“Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he’d have drown himself at high tide. My sister- so shy, so sincere- once wanted to be an actress. The best jazz drummer I’ve ever heard had only one arm. We all choose a calling that’s the most radical contradiction of ourselves.”
― David Shields, Dead Languages

“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, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“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, A Handbook for Drowning: Stories

“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, How Literature Saved My Life

“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, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“I’m interested in knowing the secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets are the same.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“He who follows another will never overtake him.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“The ancient Indian epic Mahābhārata asks, “Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.”
― David Shields, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

“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, A Handbook for Drowning: Stories

“I’m not interested in myself per se. I’m interested in myself as theme carrier, as host.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“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?”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“Candor is key—being willing to say what no one else is willing to say.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“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, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“Every man has within himself the entire human condition.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular personal attribute—their race, say, or sexual orientation, or even their physical beauty—are always the writers whose work (the reception to whose work) has most directly benefited from this attribute.”
― David Shields, Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity

“always try to read form as content, style as meaning.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“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.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“Every work, no matter how short or antilinear, needs momentum;”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems,”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto