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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff a...

David Foster Wallace

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian ...

David Foster Wallace

For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.

David Foster Wallace

Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, to erect bridges across the chasms that separate selves. Sexuality is, finally, about imagination. Thanks to brave people's recognition of AIDS as a f...

David Foster Wallace

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it mig...

David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional 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. Despairing, then, of describing the em...

David Foster Wallace

With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to fuck around if you’re a feminist but it’s also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren’t feminists and won’t respect you and won’t call you again if you f...

David Foster Wallace

HISTORIA RADICALMENTE CONCENTRADA DE LA ERA POSTINDUSTRIAL Cuando fueron presentados, él hizo un comentario ingenioso porque quería caer bien. Ella soltó una risotada estrepitosa porque quería caer bien. Luego los dos cogieron sus coches y se fue...

David Foster Wallace

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

David Foster Wallace

And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it'd be 'See, you're leaving after all when you promised you wouldn't....

David Foster Wallace

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

David Foster Wallace

Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not to do the ridiculous ...

David Foster Wallace

That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' ...

David Foster Wallace

JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life? LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow. JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth? LENORE: I smell trap. JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But ...

David Foster Wallace

Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.

David Foster Wallace

This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

David Foster Wallace

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

David Foster Wallace

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

David Foster Wallace

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

David Foster Wallace

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?

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