“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
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
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 Copy Share Image
“The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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 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
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
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies. — 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
“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 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
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
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
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
“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 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
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
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
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
“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
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
“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 novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane. — 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
“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 story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing…” 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)
