It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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
We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility… — 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
I mean the people who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean you… — 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
And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness. — 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
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
Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means… — 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
