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
pain vision pleasure
The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
powerful mistake coffee
And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.
thinking people substance
...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
saws realism ifs
If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
pain depressed-person essentials
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing 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.
trying stuff mystical
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
want dieting murder
Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
jobs writing artist
Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.
rejection connections painful
The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
before-death truth-is
Capital T-truth is about life before death.
airplane writing next
A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
lonely pain loneliness
Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons.
dies solipsism
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
worry tedium soar
I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.