Novel Quotes by David Shields

To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the…

— David Shields

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…

— David Shields

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

— David Shields

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

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming.…

— David Shields

Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs.

— David Shields

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

— David Shields

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…

— David Shields

I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of…

— David Shields

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as…

— David Shields

“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

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

— David Shields

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

— David Shields

I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.

— David Shields

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

— David Shields