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
disease world assumption
The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
flesh doe window
Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
crush selfish simple
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
sadness hatred my-love-for-you
There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.
jobs plato smart
The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.
home thinking missing
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
integrity sleep forever
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
nihilism stills
Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
support important vivid
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
loneliness solitude function
...loneliness is not a function of solitude.
expectations forever talent
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
love-is trying care
Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.
character thinking circles
My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
hurt want
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.