David Shields Quotes

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

There's no literary merit in my books.

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

A book makes claims of literary art.

That complete statement which is literature.

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

All literature is gossip.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.