193 Quotes by David Shields

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

Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he’d have drown himself at high tide. My sister- so shy, so sincere- once wanted to be an actress. The best jazz drummer I’ve ever heard had only one arm. We all choose a calling that’s the most radical contradiction of ourselves.

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.

A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

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

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.

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

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.

Genre is a minimum security prison,