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 have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship's Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet...I now know the precise… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
A lot of writers tired of doing kind of hip, slick, funny, dark, exploding hypocrisy, underlining once again the point that life… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex… — 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
Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a… — 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
