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
David Foster Wallace quotes about
weapons tvs nuclear
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
doctors smell needs
Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Garton said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It's like what's the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower
distress restroom concentrating
I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.
prodigies handle
Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
animal past people
Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.
eye son boys
The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.
lying silence hard
So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?
eating legality bits
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").
manhattan tvs blame
All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
thinking desire young-writers
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
commitment loss childhood
To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
addiction people boring
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.
tired people ears
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
sarcasm care bottles
sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.