David Foster Wallace quotes - page 9

David Foster Wallace was an American writer and essayist, celebrated for his innovative narrative style and insightful explorations of contemporary life. His novel "Infinite Jest" is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of late 20th-century literature. He became known for blending intellectual depth with humor and emotional honesty in his writing. Here are 227 of his quotes:

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it." [Q&A with Larry McCaffery,, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2].

David Foster Wallace

What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love?

David Foster Wallace

Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.

David Foster Wallace

It is named the "Web" for good reason.

David Foster Wallace

Capital T-truth is about life before death.

David Foster Wallace

Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets,. Hear it? It's a love song. For whom? You are loved.

David Foster Wallace

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.

David Foster Wallace

This is water.

David Foster Wallace

There is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

David Foster Wallace

Abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it's interesting.

David Foster Wallace

She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

David Foster Wallace

... perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

David Foster Wallace

There's been time this whole time. You can't kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.

David Foster Wallace

It is extremely difficult to stay alert & attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monolog inside your head.

David Foster Wallace

Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a. m. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek.

David Foster Wallace

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

David Foster Wallace

We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?

David Foster Wallace

... I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.

David Foster Wallace

The John Ziegler Show is the first local, nonsyndicated late-night program that KFI has aired in a long time. It's something of a gamble for everyone involved. Ten o'clock to one qualifies as late at night in southern California, where hardly anything reputable's open after nine.

David Foster Wallace

Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some sort of basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, goey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

David Foster Wallace

KFI's John Ziegler is not a journalist - he is an entertainer. Or maybe it's better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.

David Foster Wallace

Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don't have names.

David Foster Wallace