You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
Interpretation
True writers must produce a significant body of work to earn the title.
This quote by David Foster Wallace emphasizes the idea that the label of 'writer' is not simply a title one can assume; it requires demonstrable effort and output. By suggesting that one must write at least fifty stories, Wallace points to the importance of practice, dedication, and accumulation of experiences in the journey to becoming a true writer.
In practice
A writing workshop discussion about what it means to be a writer.
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 youβve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and itβs like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.
We can say with some assurance that, although children may be the victims of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect.
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
For every child prodigy that you know about, at least 50 potential ones have burned out before you even heard about them.
We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.
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