No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories. — 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
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their… — 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
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies. — 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
God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to… — 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
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
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during… — 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
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love'… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in… — 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
“But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red 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
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
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’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to… — 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
“This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains… — 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
Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol'… — 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
“Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you… — 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
“But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Interviewer ...In the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“But the truth is it’s hard for me to know what I really think about any of the stuff I’ve written. It’s… — 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
“This is apparently a little promotional ¶ where we’re supposed to explain “how and why we came to” the subject of our… — 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
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
“Formal writing does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clear, clean, maximally considerate writing.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job… — 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
“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
![“This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous 'I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in…” quote by David Foster Wallace](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d3a/david-foster-wallace-161_english_this-was-in-orwell-s-1946-politics-and-t_922979.jpg)
![“This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with…” quote by David Foster Wallace](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/8fa/david-foster-wallace-161_about-yourself_this-story-the-depressed-person-was-the_2572995.jpg)
![“[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)
