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

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

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.

David Foster Wallace

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and ju...

David Foster Wallace

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

David Foster Wallace

I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness.

David Foster Wallace

Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think that that’s—that that’s it. That that’s the point, that that’s the goal, you know? And that’s th...

David Foster Wallace

It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child’s desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love...

David Foster Wallace

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone ...

David Foster Wallace

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

David Foster Wallace

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

David Foster Wallace

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

David Foster Wallace

People hate people, not freedom.

David Foster Wallace

I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy.

David Foster Wallace

I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying u...

David Foster Wallace

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.

David Foster Wallace

The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.

David Foster Wallace

I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.

David Foster Wallace

The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.

David Foster Wallace

Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.

David Foster Wallace

Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

David Foster Wallace

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the w...

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