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
Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it,… — 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
Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to… — 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
It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. — 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
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to… — 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
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 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
