I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“...the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol'… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Many people in America throw the term "fascism" around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“If you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
![“This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with…” quote by David Foster Wallace](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/8fa/david-foster-wallace-161_about-yourself_this-story-the-depressed-person-was-the_2572995.jpg)
