193 Quotes by David Shields

The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.

The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.

Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic.

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.

Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.

As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.

In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.

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 backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it.