I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“It's when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of… — 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
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
“A big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Infinite Jest specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“that they always give their horoscope readers (like Joyce every morning, over vegetable juice she made herself in a special machine) that… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I wasn't all that attracted to writing originally. I read a great deal. My parents read a great deal. I do know… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“We're all—especially those of us who are educated and have read a lot and have watched TV critically—in a very self-conscious and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“This is apparently a little promotional ¶ where we’re supposed to explain “how and why we came to” the subject of our… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries.… — 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.10 10… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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 Image
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 Image
![“[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.” quote by David Foster Wallace](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/6b0/david-foster-wallace-161_books_i-f-the-writer-does-his-job-right-what-h_745056.jpg)
