The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want… — 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
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
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 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 that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going… — 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
When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e.,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
...and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud… — 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
