Quotes by David Foster Wallace

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

Im so scared of dying without ever being really seen.

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. Theres a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, were marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah. You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized its because its not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people its speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were saved.

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.

How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

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.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks ofmen. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you cantgrab onto.

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And Im starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all lifes sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since its my own choices thatll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.

Time wasnt passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.

she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.

When he smoked marijuana he tended to masterbate a great deal.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.