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21 " I’m not interested in myself per se. I’m interested in myself as theme carrier, as host. "
― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
22 " Every man has within himself the entire human condition. "
23 " Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. "
24 " You want to put in a little bit of David—the safe part of David—the David that you wouldn’t be afraid to show anybody, but there is a David that you don’t want to be in the film, and that’s what you should try to put in, if you don’t dare face yourself other ways. Confess things to the camera. Say the things you’re most ashamed of, things you don’t want to remember, things you don’t want anybody to know. Maybe that way there’ll be some truth. "
25 " Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality. "
26 " always try to read form as content, style as meaning. "
27 " The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing. "
28 " What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, "
29 " Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage. "
30 " Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular personal attribute—their race, say, or sexual orientation, or even their physical beauty—are always the writers whose work (the reception to whose work) has most directly benefited from this attribute. "
― David Shields , Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity
31 " 593Still (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. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that. "
32 " The ancient Indian epic Mahābhārata asks, “Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die. "
― David Shields , The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead
33 " one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers, take note. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction. "
34 " La trama è roba per gente morta. "
35 " aphorism—“A photograph is a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know”— "
36 " I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, "
37 " The center of the artistic process—for me—is the attempt to transform a particular feeling, insight, sorrow into a metaphor and then make that metaphor ramify so it holds everything, everything in the world. "
38 " think it’s a poetry that comes out of the stuff of the poet’s personal life, but he’s trying to render this experience in more general and inclusive, or what used to be called universal, "
39 " What is true for you in your private heart is true for all men. "
40 " Deep down, you know you’re him. "