A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.
David Shields
In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.
All art is theft.
I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.
We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.
Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
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.
I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.
The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.
I argued strongly to the American publisher that 'Reality Hunger' should come out first. They thought that 'The Thing About Life' would have more appeal because it's on a broader topic; it's about mortality rather than art.
Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time.
I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros.
Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.
Seattle is still more Caucasian than most medium-sized cities. The sort of psychosexual politics of white fandom in context of black athletes who are also both very rich and slightly angry is just, to me, bottomlessly fascinating.
Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.
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.
I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful.
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast.
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.
The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses.
I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty.
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown.
Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture: to reflect back its 'whatness,' refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness.
I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.
I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects.
The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.
The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.
I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'
When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly.
I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.
I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.
The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional.
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.
A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.
We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.
I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker.
We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.
Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule.
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.
The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.
Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating.
All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
