You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the deep emotional commitment an artist may feel to engage and move their audience.
In this quote, David Foster Wallace expresses the intense passion and vulnerability that can accompany the act of writing. He suggests that a writer must be willing to risk their own emotional safety, akin to 'dying' in a metaphorical sense, in order to genuinely connect with and affect their readers. This sentiment encapsulates the struggle artists face when balancing authenticity and the fear of judgment.
In practice
In a literary workshop, one might use this quote to highlight the emotional depth needed in creative writing.
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.
When I was growing up, there weren't that many queer girls of colour making music. So I just wanted to be able to exist, just to be that, without putting too much emphasis on it.
In music, you ain't really got to be able to sing. In comedy, you may be cute, you may be able to add a little extra to your routine, but if you're not funny, no one's really rocking with you - and if you're a black woman, you better be hilarious. As usual, we always have to do the most.
I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
The concept with Off-White is that I have no ideal target. It's more about trying to make something for everyone. And I think that's what helps make it unique. That there isn't a specific muse.
It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
To be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.
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