Explore Quotes by David Foster Wallace

The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.

I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.

The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

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.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’

This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside.

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

I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father...once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called "antiparanoia," in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.