Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies. - David Foster Wallace
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories. - 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
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir. - 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
It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it. - 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
God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed. - David Foster Wallace
I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. - David Foster Wallace
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. - David Foster Wallace
There are very few innocent sentences in writing. - David Foster Wallace
We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness. - David Foster Wallace
I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that I worried a lot - David Foster Wallace
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages. - 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
I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt assadness. - David Foster Wallace
a manual for how to build a mentally ill child - David Foster Wallace
People hate people, not freedom. - David Foster Wallace
Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist makingdevastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious orpompous. - David Foster Wallace
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. - 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
If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. - David Foster Wallace
You get to decide what to worship. - David Foster Wallace
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, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2] - David Foster Wallace
For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always doesn't know what's going on and has to ask somebody; it always seems like everybody else knows what's going on. This is a clear low-status marker, and I resisted it. - David Foster Wallace