David Shields Quotations

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any,

You're one of 6.5 billion people now on the planet, and 99.9 percent of your genes are the same as everyone else's.

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I've ever wanted.

Genre is a minimum security prison,

I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.

Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic-not the actual thing, but the imprint of it.

I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.

Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.

I don’t know what’s the matter with me, why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

We've entered the age of confusion in oil policy.

The announcement of American Airlines to start Dallas, Fort Worth, is strategically important for Jamaica and is a very important opportunity for our Midwest market, and western U.S., as well as western Canada. Our Japanese market will also benefit significantly because the American Airlines flight will allow for same day one-stop service from Narita Tokyo in Japan to MoBay.

The 10 billion barrels would be a substantial amount if there were a basis for it, and there's not at this point.

We are really tired of people asking us about our rankings and we have to say we're not ranked because we do not have a full-time day program. We're not doing this just for the rankings, but unfortunately, this is the way the game is played.

We're not expecting a large volume of Chinese visitors to (suddenly) run to Jamaica. So we're looking at the marketing in a structured, managed way. We know we need to look at the return on the investment. There are lots of challenges but there has been tremendous support from other agencies of government, from the foreign affairs and national security ministries. We have to be patient.

When I went back home over the summer, it seems like everyone is in a rush to be in a specific place. Boise's just so much more relaxed.

This was in fact before the establishment of the embassy last year, and proved to have been very useful for us from a tourism perspective, also in terms of Jamaica's understanding of the market and also from some indications of cultural activities and cultural levels.

I've never seen a potato farm since I've been down here.

It's a very difficult area to develop. You need sophisticated drilling techniques to develop it commercially.

The airlift situation is not seamless and although in the last year we have seen, for example, Continental Airlines starting non-stop service from Newark to Beijing and Air Canada doing service from Beijing to Toronto, the difficulty of the visa over the US presents a problem for the Chinese.

It's hard to compensate for a super giant field with something much less than a super giant field.

The conservancy supports land trusts being held to the highest standards. Land conservation is a maturing field and there are many land trusts being created every year, and it behooves us to operate in a professional manner.

If our sample is representative of the larger youth sport population, this finding would suggest that there are nearly 2 million kids being physically abused by their coaches each year.

Along with the Jamaican embassy in Beijing and the Ministry of National Security, we are ensuring the appropriate visa issuing protocols are in place. We are also talking with our airline partners to ensure a smooth trip. These two factors are critical on the Chinese end.