« All Reader Quotes · David Foster Wallace's Page
Reader Quotes by 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 to see or…
- It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
- We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the…
- In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s…
- The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
- The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight…
- I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility…
- To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print,…
- ....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a…
- [I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
More Reader Quotes
- Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance are the writers who take advantage of present… — Samuel Johnson
- I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander. — Isaac Asimov
- I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,'… — Margaret Atwood
- One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered… — Beverly Cleary
- All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick… — Steve Almond
- A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents. — Friedrich Nietzsche
- Sometimes language gets in the way of the story's feelings. The reader finds himself experiencing the language of the story rather than… — Leonard Michaels
- Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader… — Barbara Tuchman