Quotes by David Foster Wallace

“Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, bec...”

“In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis. It's not our fault! It's ...”

“I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.”

“The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.”

“Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.”

“You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.”

“Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.”

“Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the br...”

“This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a Western European, is that there are things we know are right, and good, and w...”

“If, by the virtue of charity or the funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once MAs Department of Social Services has taken a mothers children away for a...”

“Anything that inspires addiction or obsession - substances, entertainment, beauty, secrecy - is dangerous in that it can lead to isolation, self-absorption, and disconnection, to paralyzed stasis: ...”

“Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.”

“Gately can't even imagine what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It's like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like playi...”

“Maybe its not metaphysics. Maybe its existential. Im talking about the individual US citizens deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks abou...”

“I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid...”

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

“Q: What do you think is magical about fiction?DFW: ... The first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking o...”

“This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.”

“Your personal will is the web your disease sits and spins in. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.”

“Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.”