Quotes by David Foster Wallace

“Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclos...”

“But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as n...”

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, an...”

“Theres been time this whole time. You cant kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.”

“Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.”

“That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importan...”

“And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it'd be 'See, you...”

“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 i”

“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.”

“When he smoked marijuana he tended to masterbate a great deal.”

“When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part ...”

“There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of soci...”

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

“The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.”

“The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits.”

“For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.”

“I guess a bit part of serious fictions 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 don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt assadness.”

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

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”