David Foster Wallace

“Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk…

— David Foster Wallace

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e.,…

— David Foster Wallace

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

“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.…

— David Foster Wallace

“For what it's worth, I accept the basic idea that parents instinctively do 'love' their offspring no matter what -- the evolutionary…

— David Foster Wallace

Happiness is not like we were walking around fingering razor blades or anything like that. But it just sort of seems as…

— David Foster Wallace

“Lie there panning, looking, all ribs and elbows and dilated eyes. The awake floor is littered with gear and dirty clothes, blond…

— David Foster Wallace

“Be a Student of the Game. Like most cliches of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be…

— David Foster Wallace

“…the Crocodiles say they can't even begin to say how many new guys they've seen Come In and then get sucked back…

— David Foster Wallace

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with…

— David Foster Wallace

“I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to…

— David Foster Wallace

“That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward. That…

— David Foster Wallace

(I'm not putting any of this well. I am not and never have been an intellectual. I am not articulate, and the…

— David Foster Wallace

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods…

— David Foster Wallace

“...TV and popular film and most kinds of 'low' art-- which just means art whose primary aim is to make money-- is…

— David Foster Wallace

“It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the…

— David Foster Wallace

“The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never. If they…

— David Foster Wallace

“Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as—and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be—lost and hopeless and just…

— David Foster Wallace

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still…

— David Foster Wallace

“Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you…

— David Foster Wallace

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a…

— David Foster Wallace

A lot of writers tired of doing kind of hip, slick, funny, dark, exploding hypocrisy, underlining once again the point that life…

— David Foster Wallace

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running…

— David Foster Wallace

“Of a new-era’d nation that looked out for Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that was now going to retire and have…

— David Foster Wallace

“What he'd do, he'd never go out to the length of the chain. He'd never even get out to where the chain…

— David Foster Wallace

Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an…

— David Foster Wallace

“But Don you're still a human being, you still want to live, you crave connection and society, you know intellectually that you're…

— David Foster Wallace

“Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that…

— David Foster Wallace

I mean the people who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean you…

— David Foster Wallace

“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

“I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not.…

— David Foster Wallace

I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in…

— David Foster Wallace

“But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same…

— David Foster Wallace

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and…

— David Foster Wallace

“Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers…

— David Foster Wallace

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who…

— David Foster Wallace

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that…

— David Foster Wallace

“That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities…

— David Foster Wallace

“I fully grant that mysterious invisible room-cleaning is in a way great, every true slob’s fantasy, somebody materializing and deslobbing your room…

— David Foster Wallace

“They said downstairs the Parnate made me black out. It did a blood pressure thing. My mother heard noises upstairs and found…

— David Foster Wallace