David Shields

I think the core of fans' relationship is one that vacillates schizophrenically and mercurially from reverence to resentment. Fans fetishize the players' athletic genius and both deify it and demonize it; witness the way awe turns into anger whenever a player holds out or flips off the offensive coordinator. ”

I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros. ”

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life. ”

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world. ”

You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about? ”

I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is. ”

Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. ”

Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt. ”

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

I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art. ”