David Foster Wallace quote: "What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings."

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good on...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer c...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

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

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The great myth is that the bad ones don't last long.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a p...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutti...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Some people, from what I've seen, boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what l...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being aro...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for th...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, m...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from ev...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the fla...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barel...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The 46-year-old recipient of the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart was actively window shopping in...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

At least part of the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years my mom brainwashed us in all sort of subt...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn't see myself taking pills to try to be less of a f...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in th...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establis...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, n...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older pe...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I am not what you see and hear.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain w...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American househo...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescen...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we fi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the con...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it r...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

....basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony wher...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated poin...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whoomi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chap...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Can you "choose" something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp an...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I have felt as bleak as I've felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit wi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. adve...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is intereste...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please cou...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the diale...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which re...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their p...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and n...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These thin...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal em...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Mediocrity is contextual.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became errat...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachment...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

... That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. T...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the peop...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

[...] almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. A...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of e...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really h...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

it turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that had...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It is named the "Web" for good reason.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassione...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal e...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Suppose I were to give you a key ring [...] with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Nel momento in cui riconosceva quello che c'era su una cartuccia provava la sensazione carica d'ansi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not kno...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed libra...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Every love story is a ghost story.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

He said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
"Nobody ever finds anybody in a place ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological eras...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I am about art here, not simple reproduction.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

TV's 'real' agenda is to be 'liked,' because if you like what you're seeing,...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few yea...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Life is like tennis. Those who serve best usually win.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Nel tennis il vero avversario, la frontiera che include, è il giocatore stesso. C'è sempre e solo ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?'...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

You want to know the story? I'd be happy to tell you. I think I have just enough caloric energy stor...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going b...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool -- it's the same beast.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a h...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

...you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picay...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it
implicitly congratulates both it...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your peopl...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Lenore, it's simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fibe...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Supongo que ser tímido significa básicamente estar absorbido por uno mismo hasta el punto de que s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and lov...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men’s Room, does Sternberg, and strug...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

When something large and oncoming passed, the windshield's big rectangle was for a moment incandesce...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I am fortunately an entirely handsome devil and appear even younger than twenty-nine. I look like a ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfact...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Sometimes, when I don't think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

If I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worri...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vu...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the... hood of m...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoo...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Te occidere possunt sed te edere possunt nefas est.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Il suicidio è così contrario a tanti nostri istinti e impulsi programmati che nessuno sano di ment...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Blue Springs Memorial Hospital Palliative Care Unit, Independence, Mo.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

...this was depressing, much the way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a lit...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I don't think he was used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem was. He was ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he di...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

-when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade l...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

*One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it i...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Atwater knew — as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never sa...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I k...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

(..)-Dr. G. would later say that the whole "my whole life flashed before me" phenomenon at the end i...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a p...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

If I understand you right,' he says, 'you're saying that you're basically a calculating manipulative...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others' self esteem simply as a function o...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of wha...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of cours...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

When he smoked marijuana he tended to masterbate a great deal.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit�...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Here is how to turn down an extramural date so you won't be asked again. Say something like I'm terr...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which su...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness �...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fac...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

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

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

Copied!

David Foster Wallace

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

David Foster Wallace

Share:

Related

More David Foster Wallace