193 Quotes by David Shields

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.

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

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.

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?

The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority.

Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes.

I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years.

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.