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
thinking people terrified
I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.
philosophy use four
I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.
rap pride black
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
night sound fans
I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.
eye purpose hush
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
real tvs agendas
TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.
sports expression goal
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.
jobs wall book
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.
weapons tvs nuclear
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
inspirational believe tree
It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.
powerful real math
The real irony is that the view of infinity as some forbidden zone or road to insanity - which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years - is precisely what Cantor's own work overturned. Saying that infinity drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George's loss to the dragon: it's not only wrong but insulting.
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.