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
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
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. — 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
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
(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 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
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
I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you… — 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
