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Reality Hunger: A Manifesto QUOTES

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

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

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

3 " 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 , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

4 " To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

5 " Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

6 " A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

7 " Every work, no matter how short or antilinear, needs momentum; "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

8 " He who follows another will never overtake him. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

9 " I’m interested in knowing the secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets are the same. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

10 " Candor is key—being willing to say what no one else is willing to say. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

11 " What if America isn’t really the sort of place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead it’s the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed? "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

12 " I’m not interested in myself per se. I’m interested in myself as theme carrier, as host. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

13 " Every man has within himself the entire human condition. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

14 " Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

15 " 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. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

16 " 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. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

17 " always try to read form as content, style as meaning. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

18 " 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. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

19 " What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

20 " Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage. "

― David Shields , Reality Hunger: A Manifesto