Writer Quotes by David Foster Wallace

Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.

— David Foster Wallace

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

— David Foster Wallace

The point of books is to combat loneliness.

— David Foster Wallace

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

— David Foster Wallace

“Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”

— David Foster Wallace

“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

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

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

— David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace understood the paradox of attempting to write fiction that spoke to posterity and a contemporary audience simultaneously,”

— David Foster Wallace

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

— David Foster Wallace

“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

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

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

— David Foster Wallace

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

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

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

“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

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

In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the…

— David Foster Wallace

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

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

“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

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

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

I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries.…

— David Foster Wallace

“But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across this room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware…

— David Foster Wallace

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

— David Foster Wallace

[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

“Formal writing does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clear, clean, maximally considerate writing.”

— 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