David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

Writer

David Foster Wallace was an influential American writer known for his complex narratives and deep explorations of truth and anxiety, particularly in 'Infinite Jest.'

Thinking People Writing Real Art Loneliness
Born
February 21, 1962
Died
September 12, 2008
Quotes
345
Rank
#423

Quote collection

David Foster Wallace quotes (page 10 of 18)

345 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal."

Suicide Spiritual Book
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"the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings."

Believe Psychological Needs People
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"life's endless war against the self you cannot live without."

War Self Endless War
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"The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages."

Jobs Wall Book
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"The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’"

Eye Artist Risk
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"If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay."

Worship Weak Feels
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"The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves."

Dream People Sitting
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"Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever."

Expectations Forever Talent
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"All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression."

Manhattan Tvs Blame
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"The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror."

Pain Depressed Person Essentials
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"The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops."

Thinking Way Linear
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"And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."

Powerful Mistake Coffee
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"You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff."

Party Writing People
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"I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel."

Selfish Feeling Alone Feelings
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"My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?"

Strong Fighting Past
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"Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall."

People Bored Frustrated
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"The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection."

Rejection Connections Painful
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"Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."

Stupid Smart Feelings
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"In this country we're unprecedentedly safe, comfortable, and well fed, with more and better venues for stimulation. And yet if you were asked, 'Is this a happy or unhappy country?' you'd check the 'unhappy' box. We're living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly."

Country Emotional Drug
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