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

“Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil.”

— David Foster Wallace

“It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”

— David Foster Wallace

“The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining…

— David Foster Wallace

“Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of shit is small potatoes.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very…

— David Foster Wallace

He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly…

— David Foster Wallace

“Deluded or not, it's still a lucky way to live. Even though it's temporary. It may well be that the lower-ranked little…

— David Foster Wallace

My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have…

— David Foster Wallace

“And then now a very strange argument indeed ensues, me v. the Lebanese porter, because it turns out I am putting this…

— David Foster Wallace

“...you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don’t flatter…

— David Foster Wallace

“The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing…

— David Foster Wallace

“She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.”

— David Foster Wallace

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -…

— David Foster Wallace

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other…

— David Foster Wallace

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

— David Foster Wallace

“Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food.”

— David Foster Wallace

K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality,"…

— David Foster Wallace

“I can remember watching large, tentative, individual flakes of snow falling and blowing around aimlessly in the wind generated by the train…

— David Foster Wallace

I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in…

— David Foster Wallace

“[T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our…

— David Foster Wallace

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

“...the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.”

— David Foster Wallace

“And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to…

— David Foster Wallace

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s…

— David Foster Wallace