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
hate love-you way
I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.
art thinking ideas
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.
art mean thinking
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
travel stronger agoraphobia
For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
two lines diagnosis
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
suicide spiritual book
Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.
littles stuff arrogant
The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
party writing imagination
You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.
powerful irony impossible
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
jobs important information
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
military real rivers
And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas and moved like streams into rivers and jets at and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses.
loneliness fiction relieved
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.
worship weak feels
If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay
meaningful running unique
a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives? and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it...