American - Author | July 22, 1956 -
I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.
David Shields
StruggleFeelBackKnowDamnWay
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.
BookProblemBackHumanAnswers
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.
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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.
GoodBestSwimmingSlowBackMissed
The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.
HatePeopleMePageWantTurn
I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.
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I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother?
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The 'Times' is understood to be almost the unofficial biographer of the country, in some strange way to be printing a kind of quasi-neutral truth or even, in some people's minds, slightly center-left version of reality.
TruthPeopleRealityCountryKind
Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs.
ArtYourselfYouDangerousAlive
Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face.
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I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.
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Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.
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