"I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
David Foster Wallace quotes (page 7 of 18)
345 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Fiction is about what it is to be a human being."
Read quote
6 likes
"The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush."
Read quote
6 likes
"This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody."
Read quote
6 likes
"This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it."
Read quote
6 likes
"The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?"
Read quote
6 likes
"It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility."
Read quote
6 likes
"I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator."
Read quote
6 likes
"I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting."
Read quote
5 likes
"My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me."
Read quote
5 likes
"Every love story is a ghost story."
Read quote
5 likes
"Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around."
Read quote
5 likes
"I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity"
Read quote
5 likes
"You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away."
Read quote
5 likes
"I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop."
Read quote
5 likes
"...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome."
Read quote
5 likes
"Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people."
Read quote
5 likes
"...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about."
Read quote
5 likes
"But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things."
Read quote
5 likes
"I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes."
Read quote
5 likes