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
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' — this sort… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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 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
My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly… — 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
“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
