Quotes by David Foster Wallace

About David Foster Wallace:

David Foster Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
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An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a...

David Foster Wallace

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material succ...

David Foster Wallace

The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside — you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harde...

David Foster Wallace

You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

David Foster Wallace

A question, doctor," he said. "Why doesn't the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?" He smiled coolly. "Why doesn't the coyote simply...

David Foster Wallace

The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

David Foster Wallace

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

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 y...

David Foster Wallace

For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

David Foster Wallace

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan moth...

David Foster Wallace

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

David Foster Wallace

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

David Foster Wallace

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great...

David Foster Wallace

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

David Foster Wallace

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the during the first eight pages.

David Foster Wallace

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

David Foster Wallace

Author Bio

  • NameDavid Foster Wallace
  • DescriptionFiction writer, essayist
  • BornFebruary 21, 1962
  • DiedSeptember 12, 2008
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksInfinite Jest; The Pale King; A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again; Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program