When I produce a record, I roll up my sleeves; I'm not one of those passive guys. I really get i...
DAVID FOSTER We are who people think we are.
DAVID FOSTER There's an evolutionary imperative why we give a crap about our family and friends. And there's an e...
DAVID FOSTER I'm probably wouldn't do anything differently if I had to do it again. Every little thing th...
DAVID FOSTER I think that most of my romance comes out in my music. And if you look at my track record of three e...
DAVID FOSTER Just keep a paper copy of what you filed.
DAVID FOSTER If you don't have much in other deductions and thus your itemized deductions aren't much higher than...
DAVID FOSTER Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
DAVID FOSTER I'm taking it one day at a time and I guess that's all I can do.
DAVID FOSTER We spent the night at a parking lot until the next morning.
DAVID FOSTER This has gone too far,
DAVID FOSTER To bring in the people, you have to have something different. You might not come down because you sa...
DAVID FOSTER It's to provide an inexpensive night out on the town. The community coming together, that's really t...
DAVID FOSTER The summer concerts in Stone Park have been one of my passions.
DAVID FOSTER He's a lovable man. He opens up his heart and gives his heart to everyone.
DAVID FOSTER We love our pastor. The Bible tells us that reconciliation is the word of God. That's all it is. So ...
DAVID FOSTER The irony of his fame now really is that he was one of the least significant rulers.
DAVID FOSTER Crediting Dick Cheney and this administration's policies with the success of Harley-Davidson - or an...
DAVID FOSTER To divert meaningful volumes of through-trucks from I-81 in Virginia, the upgraded rail line would n...
DAVID FOSTER With Celine Dion, we were selling 25 million records a pop. 'Pop' stands for 'popular.&#...
DAVID FOSTER Commerce and art are natural enemies. And also, the enemy of good is great. And the enemy of great i...
DAVID FOSTER I told Celine Dion not to record that 'Titanic' song. That's about as big as you can get...
DAVID FOSTER There's plenty of people who can sing OK that make terrific records, and I love them from afar. ...
DAVID FOSTER 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