David Foster Wallace was an American writer and university professor in the disciplines of English and creative writing. His novel Infinite Jest was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. Profoundly inspirational David Foster Wallace quotes will challenge the way you think, and help guide you through any life experience.
If you’re searching for famous quotes from greatest authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of quotes by Douglas Adams, best Elizabeth Gilbert quotes and greatest Ernest Hemingway quotes.
Famous David Foster Wallace Quotes
The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. David Foster Wallace
The so called psychotically depressed person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote hopelessness or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling Don’t! and Hang on! can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling. David Foster Wallace
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. David Foster Wallace
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. David Foster Wallace
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. David Foster Wallace
I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it. David Foster Wallace
For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going. David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. David Foster Wallace
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It’s probably more Western than U.S. per se. David Foster Wallace
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. David Foster Wallace
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. David Foster Wallace
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. David Foster Wallace
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. David Foster Wallace
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a oneby one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion these are the places for me where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. David Foster Wallace
Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being. David Foster Wallace
If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote. David Foster Wallace
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. David Foster Wallace
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it. David Foster Wallace
This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. David Foster Wallace
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words. David Foster Wallace
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants. David Foster Wallace
It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know. David Foster Wallace
The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be. David Foster Wallace
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you. David Foster Wallace
We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader’s own life outside the story changes the story. David Foster Wallace
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? David Foster Wallace
This is so American, man either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. David Foster Wallace
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo prone and generally pathetic. David Foster Wallace
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do? David Foster Wallace
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die. David Foster Wallace
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. David Foster Wallace
It did what all ads are supposed to do create an anxiety relievable by purchase. David Foster Wallace
Rap’s conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. David Foster Wallace
Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people including myself will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking? David Foster Wallace
I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. David Foster Wallace
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. David Foster Wallace
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art. David Foster Wallace
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself. David Foster Wallace
What TV is extremely good at and realize that this is all it does is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. David Foster Wallace
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says Morning, boys. How’s the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes What the hell is water? David Foster Wallace
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. David Foster Wallace
What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves, they’ve got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings. David Foster Wallace
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush. David Foster Wallace
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work. David Foster Wallace
We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back I mean, what’s wrong with us? David Foster Wallace
I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity. David Foster Wallace
It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. David Foster Wallace
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still. David Foster Wallace
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most familiarity is meditated and delusive. David Foster Wallace
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. David Foster Wallace
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. David Foster Wallace
I read, I say. I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and rom drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it. My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. David Foster Wallace
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. David Foster Wallace
To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. David Foster Wallace
The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. David Foster Wallace
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. David Foster Wallace
Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. David Foster Wallace
The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy Ops, for your info. David Foster Wallace
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? David Foster Wallace
You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. David Foster Wallace
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. David Foster Wallace
There’s a kind of Ah ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art. David Foster Wallace
It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out. David Foster Wallace
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. David Foster Wallace
We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. David Foster Wallace
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. David Foster Wallace
Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. David Foster Wallace
I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I. David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. David Foster Wallace
Every love story is a ghost story. David Foster Wallace
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still. David Foster Wallace
I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me. David Foster Wallace
I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them. David Foster Wallace
The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. David Foster Wallace
