David Foster Wallace

“Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually get to get paid for…

— David Foster Wallace

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

The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure…

— David Foster Wallace

“(Where do they get these giant flags? What happens to them when there's no campaign? Where do they go? Where do you…

— David Foster Wallace

“Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or…

— David Foster Wallace

…there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging…

— David Foster Wallace

“Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have…

— David Foster Wallace

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually…

— David Foster Wallace

“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…

— David Foster Wallace

“It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast…

— David Foster Wallace

“[Stice's] parents had met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS — just outside Liberal KS on the…

— David Foster Wallace

“There are no choices without personal freedom…We say that one cannot be human without freedom…Your freedom is the freedom from, no one…

— David Foster Wallace

“And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How…

— David Foster Wallace

“What’s precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there’s a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it…

— David Foster Wallace

“It's a pivotal, it's a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment,…

— David Foster Wallace

“The 'base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated…

— David Foster Wallace

“Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a…

— David Foster Wallace

“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never…

— David Foster Wallace

“Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world…

— David Foster Wallace

...and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and…

— David Foster Wallace

“Una vez que me han visto, no pueden pensar en otra cosa ni quieren ver a nadie más y dejan de atender…

— David Foster Wallace

“It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that…

— David Foster Wallace

“The bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's…

— David Foster Wallace

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

“The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people,…

— David Foster Wallace

“Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great…

— David Foster Wallace

You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range.…

— David Foster Wallace

“Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-away-to-something they need to do [...]…

— David Foster Wallace

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud…

— David Foster Wallace

“You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic…

— David Foster Wallace

“But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of…

— David Foster Wallace

“It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical…

— David Foster Wallace

“The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that…

— David Foster Wallace

“And a funny thing happens. The man begins to like the Thermos woman. Not love, but like, which is something the man…

— David Foster Wallace

“You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV…

— David Foster Wallace

“But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within…

— David Foster Wallace

“The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe even 50, without wanting to…

— David Foster Wallace

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding…

— David Foster Wallace

“Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by…

— David Foster Wallace

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the…

— David Foster Wallace