David Shields

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

— 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…

— 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,…

— 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…

— 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…

— David Shields

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

— David Shields

“A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and…

— 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

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I…

— David Shields

“Samuel Johnson: A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it .”

— David Shields

Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing…

— David Shields

“Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he’d have…

— David Shields

“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.…

— David Shields

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

— David Shields

“My father reminds me that according to Midrash - the ever-evolving commentary upon the Hebrew scriptures - when you arrive in the…

— David Shields

“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…

— David Shields

In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay…

— David Shields

If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to…

— David Shields