David Foster Wallace Quotes

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

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?

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.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

Mediocrity is contextual.

Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

...loneliness is not a function of solitude.

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 pages.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’

If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.

The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.

The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.

I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

The man who knows his limitations, has none.

The point of books is to combat loneliness.

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

I am not what you see and hear.

...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

every failure is also a victory.

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

...morning is the soul's night.

There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.

There are secrets within secrets, though--always.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.

He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

‎Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?

....basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a tree...Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often.