David Foster Wallace Quotes

The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

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 the reader.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.

Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

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, saying this.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

You get to decide what to worship.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?

Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

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

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.

It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity

Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.