Quotes by David Foster Wallace

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.

Postmodern irony and cynicisms become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming whats wrong, because theyll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Ironys gone from liberating to enslaving. [.] The postmodern founders patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit I dont really mean what I say. So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That its impossible to mean what you say? That maybe its too bad its impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, todays irony ends up saying: How very banal to ask what I mean. Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.This is why our educated teleholic friends use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic.

In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TVs institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis. Its not our fault! Its outmoded technologys fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to institutionalize anything through its demonic mass psychology! Lets let Joe B., the little lonely guy, be his own manipulator or video-bits! Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself, in the privacy of his very own home and skull, TVs ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cajones will be broken!E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)

I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.

The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.

Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.

Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasnt allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break hed have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what hed really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.

This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a Western European, is that there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly its like Yeah, but, you know, its so much funnier and nicer to go do something else. and Who cares? and Its all bullshit anyway.

Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? Its like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.

If, by the virtue of charity or the funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once MA’s Department of Social Services has taken a mother’s children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S ., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e. once deemed Unfit— no matter why or when, or what’s transpired in the meantime— there’s nothing a mother can do.(...)That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers , you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.(...)That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.(...)That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.(...)That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.(...)That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.(...)That most Substance -addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive -type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then gettingready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good.(...)That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.(...)That certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

Gately cant even imagine what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. Its like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like playing a lot of really precise pool.

Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’ ‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.

For me, art thats alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

Q: What do you think is magical about fiction?DFW: ... The first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I dont know what youre thinking or what its like inside you and you dont know what its like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way... Theres another level... A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that Im sitting in a chair. Theres real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesnt make me feel less lonely... Theres a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesnt happen all the time. Its these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone--intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that Im in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I dont with other art.

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

Your personal will is the web your disease sits and spins in. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.