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
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 often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself. — 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
I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.' ... 'I don't… — 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
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
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 miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually… — 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
Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame… — 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
Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention...it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded,… — 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
