American - Author | July 22, 1956 -
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
David Shields
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Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.
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In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
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I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.
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What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.
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It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people.
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Seattle's not a particularly Jewish city, and I'm not in any way religious. Since I've been here, I've been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer.
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I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.
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Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
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I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.
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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.
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The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.
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