David Foster Wallace Quotes

David Foster Wallace Quotes

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

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.

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

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

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.

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.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

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

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?

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

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

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

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

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

So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

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.

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.

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.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen.

...having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.

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.

I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved.

Credo di sembrare un tipo normale, forse persino simpatico, anche se mi hanno consigliato di apparire il più normale possibile, e di non provare nemmeno a fare quella che a me parrebbe un'espressione simpatica o un sorriso.

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

The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art.

...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing - not nothing, but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.

You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]

It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and
essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep
reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.

How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

People hate people, not freedom.

the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in the traffic jam...

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.

Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency - sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying - are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.

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

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.

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