If the bus driver is black, I thank him… when I get off at my spot, whereas I would never think of doing this if the driver were white. – David Shields
The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. – David Shields
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. – David Shields
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. – David Shields
My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He’s not really bad. He’s only pretend bad – I know that – but he allows me to fantasize about being bad. – David Shields
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. – David Shields
I think the core of fans’ relationship is one that vacillates schizophrenically and mercurially from reverence to resentment. Fans fetishize the players’ athletic genius and both deify it and demonize it; witness the way awe turns into anger whenever a player holds out or flips off the offensive coordinator. – David Shields
New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and – possessing a vision unhumbled by technology – use them to disassemble/recreate the Web. – David Shields
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. – David Shields
The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture. – David Shields
I try to be as honest as I possibly can about the contradictions within my own heart and thereby get to something ‘true’ and revealing and important about contemporary American culture and human nature. – David Shields
From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life. – David Shields
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. – David Shields
That’s why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life. – David Shields
The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don’t have the same kinds of flaws your subject has. – David Shields
Sports – especially the NBA – function as a place where American society pretends to discuss and pretends to solve questions and historical agonies that can’t possibly be solved within the realm of sports. – David Shields
The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network. – David Shields
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. – David Shields
The originating sin of America is slavery, for which reparations should be paid and will never be paid; as a result, mini-reparations are paid daily, and the NBA remains, for me, reparations theater. – David Shields
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. – David Shields
I’m really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom. – David Shields
We judge athletes as if we all don’t have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. – David Shields
Nothing really changes: the individual’s ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. – David Shields
You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch’s quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he’s really amazing. – David Shields
When you’re in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture. – David Shields