David Shields Quotes

Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?'

A book makes claims of literary art.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

Some of the most interesting questions needing to be asked today can best be asked on television, or on stage, and they can be wonderful, great dramas, but they won't necessarily be blockbusters.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

I aspire to write what are called 'familiar essays.' They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It's not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope.

I don't think good films have messages.

I would not have so many scripts being driven by demographics. The play's the thing - not the 18-35 year old male age group.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

The things that inspire people to think are what keeps a film alive.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

The one thing about art is you can't question it. Everyone is looking at everyone else to find out what's cool. No one knows what's cool.

I think the novel is at one end of the art-entertainment continuum - the play in the middle - while TV and cinema veer a bit more towards entertainment.