David Shields Quotes

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

I think Pirandello had something to say to people about what truth really is.

Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

What you see is what you see.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.

Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.