You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
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.
Interpretation
Fiction serves as a means to explore one's true self and express honesty rather than merely a tool for self-presentation or evasion.
In this quote, David Foster Wallace suggests that fiction is not just a form of escapism, but rather a profound avenue for self-exploration and truth-telling. It emphasizes that through the act of creating or engaging with art, one can reflect on their own identity and convey deeper truths rather than just presenting a likable facade to the world.
In practice
In a writing workshop, a facilitator quotes Wallace to inspire participants to find personal truths in their stories.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.
What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.
An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.
None of my other investments give me the joy that autographs do because they make me feel that I am holding a piece of history in my hands.
I don't start a film with the heroine but with the cinema subject. If there is a woman in the story, she has to be of a particular type. It's not as if I start with Madhuri Dixit and then think what kind of film.
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