"Great short stories and great jokes have a……" — David Foster Wallace
"Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient."
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David Foster Wallace
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303 Quotes by David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace has 303 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough…
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God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who…
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When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional…
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Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you…
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Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were,…
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Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one…
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You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky…
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Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare…
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No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
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Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus…
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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
See all 303 quotes by David Foster Wallace »
More Associative Quotes
This quote is filed under Associative Quotes,
one of 15 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
— Larry Wall
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You're never quite sure where the song is going, because you might not find the word to rhyme with the…
— Annie Lennox
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Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative…
— Sven Birkerts
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Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to…
— Vannevar Bush
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Associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select…
— Vannevar Bush
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Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically…
— Yves Klein
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Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images…
— Siri Hustvedt
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Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder…
— Dana Spiotta
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The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order…
— Michael Graves
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Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, where the associative play…
— Albert Einstein
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Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series,…
— Ferdinand de Saussure
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We were imprinted with a value system as young children. The sensory experiences of life can trigger and stimulate a…
— Frederick Lenz
See all 15 Associative Quotes »