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
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.
loneliness solitude function
...loneliness is not a function of solitude.
loneliness interesting being-lonely
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
loneliness book combat
The point of books is to combat loneliness.
loneliness fiction relieved
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.
strong real loneliness
Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.
lonely loneliness being-alone
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
loneliness fiction treated
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
children loneliness divorce
But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.
lonely loneliness psychics
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
loneliness writing thinking
You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.
american-writer blacks conscious hideous oppression parody response sixties
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
depressing makeup noses
There's a certain kind of neurological makeup that goes along with being a writer, and having been in the room with a few other writers at the same time, it's rather wearing to be around. And it does - there is a kind of hypervigilance about it. Unfortunately it's got disadvantages. If you turn that hypervigilance on yourself and, for instance, whether or not you have a pimple on the end of your nose, it can get really depressing.
country america long
America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.