Writing Quotes by David Foster Wallace

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

— David Foster Wallace

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

— 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

— David Foster Wallace

“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

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

I wasn't all that attracted to writing originally. I read a great deal. My parents read a great deal. I do know…

— 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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was…

— David Foster Wallace

“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

“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

“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

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

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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

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