David Shields Quotes
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The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
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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.
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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.
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With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.
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Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.
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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".
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Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.
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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.
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My medium is prose, not the novel.
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Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.
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To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.
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Anything processed by memory is fiction.
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Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.
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Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.
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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.
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In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.
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A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.
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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.
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I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.
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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.
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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.
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Genre is a minimum security prison.
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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.
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The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.
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