David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallacewas an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, as well as a professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth21 February 1962
CountryUnited States of America
meaningful kissing dope
Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.
strong fighting past
My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?
stress player giving
Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
stupid trying today
[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.
men mask fingers
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.
communication icons people
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
moving order looks
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.
real artist horrible
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
thinking desire young-writers
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
self psychics toxic
There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.
pain fire would-be
For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.
loneliness interesting being-lonely
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
lonely pain selfish
But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
data people age
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' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.