Quotes by David Foster Wallace

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

“What if the preacher or fathers saying Someone heres lost and hopeless was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give th...”

“The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable If yo...”

“And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if theyre not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinit...”

“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...”

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

“You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything re...”

“Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, to erect bridges across the chasms that separate selves. Sexuality is, finally, about imagination...”

“Okay, you know, is it weird to get so depressed watching a childrens Christmas special Oh, wait, I shouldnt say that. I mean, thats not a good word. Its not just sadness, the way one feels sad at a...”

“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature ...”

“Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment becau...”

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

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

“There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work...”

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you its just words.”

“Real leaders are people who help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to...”

“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 ...”

“You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... you kids today someh...”

“The so-called psychotically depressed person who tries to kill herself doesnt do so out of quote hopelessness or any abstract conviction that lifes assets and debits do not square. And surely not b...”

“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.”