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.

The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional.

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.

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

We hunger for connection to a larger community.

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

Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.

Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market.

I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

Seattle's not a particularly Jewish city, and I'm not in any way religious. Since I've been here, I've been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer.

The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.