“Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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
“Formal writing does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clear, clean, maximally considerate writing.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“It's when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“A big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about… — 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
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 Copy Share Image
“I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip… — 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
Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did… — 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
“What’s precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there’s a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
There's a certain kind of neurological makeup that goes along with being a writer, and having been in the room with 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
“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think… — 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
“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 novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane. — 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
“Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“David Foster Wallace understood the paradox of attempting to write fiction that spoke to posterity and a contemporary audience simultaneously,” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that… — 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
![“[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.” quote by David Foster Wallace](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/6b0/david-foster-wallace-161_books_i-f-the-writer-does-his-job-right-what-h_745056.jpg)
