Art Quote by 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 can be art as well.”

David Shields

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More 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

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People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

David Shields

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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.

David Shields

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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

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

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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

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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

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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…

David Shields

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“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

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

David Shields

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

David Shields

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More Art quotes

True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the…

Benjamin Franklin