Quotes by David Foster Wallace

“This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while wr...”

“Kate Gomperts always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around ...”

“a manual for how to build a mentally ill child”

“It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any ...”

“I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient...”

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks ofmen. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can'tgrab onto.”

“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, ...”

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

“The depressed person was in terrible andunceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its esse...”

“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 sig...”

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget m...”

“Good fictions job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

“How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking The Dodge Rebellion? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger ...”

“Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we f...”

“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? In dark times, the def...”

“Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defendi...”

“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...”

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

“Under funs new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you dont want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns ...”

“Thats why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. Theyre not saying effortless in terms of it didnt seem like the writer spent any work. It s...”