Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized.
— David Shields
I'm obviously aware that most people don't agree with me, that people like to escape into a coherent world that is apart from their own.
I'm really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now.
You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter. We're vectors on the grids of cellular life.
People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.
I argued strongly to the American publisher that 'Reality Hunger' should come out first. They thought that 'The Thing About Life' would have more appeal because it's on a broader topic; it's about mortality rather than art.
You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.
Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs.
I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.
In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.
The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.
I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.
I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'
What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.
In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.
The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time.
Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful.
I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.
To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'.
I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.
I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
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.
The 'Times' is understood to be almost the unofficial biographer of the country, in some strange way to be printing a kind of quasi-neutral truth or even, in some people's minds, slightly center-left version of reality.
The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.
Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.
The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.
Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.
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.
I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.
Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.
We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.
I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.
The ways in which I was obsessed with Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp 20 years ago is completely replicated by my daughters' and my crush on Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman now.
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.
I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.
So many of the things I talk about in 'Reality Hunger' seem to be the things that 'The Thing About Life' does - things like risk, contradiction, compression, mixing modes of attack from the memoristic gesture to data-crunching.
I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.
The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority.
Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face.
I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother?
Swimming is by far the best tonic I've found for my back. I'm not a good swimmer - I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it.
I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.
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.
I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.
It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people.
Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.
In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.
