David Foster Wallace Quotes

Do not underestimate objects.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

So yo then man what's your story?

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside.

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

I find in myself a need to get very away.

You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to.

He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.

That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions.

I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.

Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.