People Quotes by David Foster Wallace

Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.

— David Foster Wallace

“People hate people, not freedom.”

— David Foster Wallace

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in…

— David Foster Wallace

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

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

— David Foster Wallace

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

— David Foster Wallace

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

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

— David Foster Wallace

“...the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.”

— David Foster Wallace

My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

— David Foster Wallace

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job…

— David Foster Wallace

Many people in America throw the term "fascism" around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a…

— David Foster Wallace

...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

— David Foster Wallace

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

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of…

— David Foster Wallace

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just…

— David Foster Wallace

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

Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and…

— David Foster Wallace

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

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with…

— David Foster Wallace

If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern,…

— David Foster Wallace

Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or…

— David Foster Wallace

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

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

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers…

— David Foster Wallace

Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them.…

— David Foster Wallace

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

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

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression.…

— David Foster Wallace

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

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose…

— David Foster Wallace

That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely,…

— David Foster Wallace

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other…

— David Foster Wallace

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

My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything.…

— David Foster Wallace

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

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

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive…

— David Foster Wallace

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

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