“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… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“... That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Infinite Jest specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.... True heroism is… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Of a new-era’d nation that looked out for Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that was now going to retire and have… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Marathe was prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Gentlemen- by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“This is what people call a view. And you knew that from below you wouldn't look nearly so high overhead. You see… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot… — 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
