I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”?… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art. — 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
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
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz… — 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
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of… — 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
There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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 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
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 Copy Share Image
If you're writing fiction, you're dealing with characters who, themselves, will have heartfelt sentiments but who, themselves, live in this culture right… — 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
