Top David Shields Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

David Shields Biography

David Shields (born July 22, 1956) is an American author.

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David Shields Quotes

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

Built, Dead, Long, Novel, Scrap, Scraps

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

Care, Deeply, Group, Groups, Littles, Who Cares

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.

Activity, Literature, Performative, Serious, Thinking

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

Everything Happens For A Reason, Happens, Reason, Say, Stories, Want

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.

Teaching, Editing, Miracle, Jefferson, Discard, Appeals

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

Thinking, Plot, Rooms, Absence, Reader

My medium is prose, not the novel.

Medium, Mediums, Novel, Prose

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.

Art, Economic Models, Engage, Reality, Transfer, Ways

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

Culture, Events, Experience, Obsessed, Real

I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.

Character, Critique, Probably, Self, Terribly, Wonderfully

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

Sacrifice, Plot, Too Much, Altar, Relatively, Exceptions

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.

Book, Reading, Order, Interesting, Progress

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.

Allies, Narrative, Honest, Disabled, Interested

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.

Labels, Narrative, Nonfiction, Pull, Qua

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.

Genes, Humanity, People, Same

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.

Distance, Rumor, Matter, Whats, Feels