"I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."
"You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal."
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Source: David Foster Wallace (2014). “The David Foster Wallace Reader”, Hachette UK
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