Top 100 David Foster Quotes
#1. Ragweed,wild oat,vetch,butcher grass,invaginate volunteer beans,all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek ...
David Foster Wallace
#3. 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
#5. The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
David Foster Wallace
#6. 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
#7. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame it feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.
David Foster Wallace
#8. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.
David Foster Wallace
#10. 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 ...
David Foster Wallace
#11. He had finished and collected the three years of drafts [of Infinite Jest], and finally sat down and typed the whole thing. Wallace didn't really type; he input the giant thing twice, with one finger. But a really fast finger.
David Lipsky
#13. daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek - Bud O.'d tagged her with a left cross - until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which
David Foster Wallace
#14. It's no coincidence it's the gurus on mountains who're wise. You get to the top: you're already theirs.
David Foster Wallace
#15. Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.
David Foster Wallace
#16. Anti-narrative sequences of a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway.
David Foster Wallace
#18. 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
#19. Had numerous pairs of dress chinos and blue blazers and Topsiders, and a smile that looked as though someone had plugged him in.
David Foster Wallace
#20. I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.
David Foster Wallace
#21. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
David Foster Wallace
#22. Whitney Houston was a laser beam ... She always gave me better than what I asked for in the studio
David Foster
#23. When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.
David Foster Wallace
#25. He said he didn't think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
"Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," he said, "People don't go to a place like that to look for other people. That's the opposite of the whole concept that's behind the thing.
David Foster Wallace
#26. The wraith responds vehemently that...No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side
David Foster Wallace
#27. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong.
David Foster Wallace
#28. Also essential to math is the sense in which abstracting something can mean reducing it to its absolute skeletal essence, as in the abstract of an article or book. As such, it can mean thinking hard about things that for the most part people can't think hard about-because it drives them crazy.
David Foster Wallace
#29. The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
David Foster Wallace
#31. No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison.
David Foster Wallace
#33. There's plenty of people who can sing OK that make terrific records, and I love them from afar. But when I make a record, I need great voices. That's always my mandate.
David Foster
#35. live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" 70 have been thrown into big-time flux.
David Foster Wallace
#36. I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.
Patrick Ness
#37. There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us
these are just the hazards of being free.
David Foster Wallace
#38. I never, even for a moment, doubted what they'd told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt's complete absence. They have forgotten.
David Foster Wallace
#39. God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though
and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.
David Foster Wallace
#40. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
David Foster Wallace
#41. A "game" that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent.
David Foster Wallace
#43. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale.
David Foster Wallace
#44. The top seed this weekend is Richard Krajicek,12 a 6'5" Dutchman who wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane.
David Foster Wallace
#45. 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
#46. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.
David Foster Wallace
#47. David Foster Wallace, in my opinion, is one of the greatest writers we've ever had, certainly in the last twenty years. His obvious dominance of the English language is partnered with honest moments and the most beautifully dark sensibility.
John Krasinski
#48. Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.
David Foster Wallace
#49. I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.
David Foster Wallace
#50. I acknowledge that I could never convey just what was so dreadful about this tableau of a bright, utterly silent room full of men immersed in work. It was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your chest and stomach about what you're seeing.
David Foster Wallace
#51. Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth
David Foster Wallace
#52. And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.
David Foster Wallace
#53. The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.
David Foster Wallace
#54. The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.
David Foster Wallace
#56. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
David Foster Wallace
#57. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.
David Foster Wallace
#58. And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman's eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.
David Foster Wallace
#60. I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.
David Foster Wallace
#63. The boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore the boots of those who did.
David Foster Wallace
#64. 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
#65. People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
#66. Like most religious mathematicians from Pythagoras to Godel, Bolzano believes that math is the Language of God and that profound metaphysical truths can be derived and proved mathematically.
David Foster Wallace
#67. I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
David Foster Wallace
#73. You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster Wallace
#75. The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
- David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)
David Foster Wallace
#76. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in ... the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
David Foster Wallace
#77. By week's end, when we'd had all manner of weather, I finally saw what it was about heavy seas and marvelous rest: in heavy seas you feel rocked to sleep, with the windows' spume a gentle shushing, the engines' throb a mother's pulse.
David Foster Wallace
#78. In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace has his narrator remark that "it was a little bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter.
William Deresiewicz
#80. She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape.
David Foster Wallace
#83. The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There's something baggy about the sky.
David Foster Wallace
#85. 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.
David Foster Wallace
#86. If you're poor old Mario Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them.
David Foster Wallace
#89. The other half is to dramatize that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.
David Foster Wallace
#90. My father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.
David Foster Wallace
#91. Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?
David Foster Wallace
#92. Don't do what you're taught to do, do what you love to do.
David Foster
#93. Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.
David Foster Wallace
#94. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists.
David Foster Wallace
#97. ... Being the worst confirmation of the worst kind of generation gap stereotype and parental disgust for their decadent, wastoid kids
David Foster Wallace
#98. For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.
David Foster Wallace
#99. Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.
David Foster Wallace
#100. 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
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