David Foster Wallace Quotes
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.
That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.
Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish
Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").
K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality," they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
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."
I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.