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
“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
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
“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
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
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
“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
“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
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
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
“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
