Top 100 Foster Wallace Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Zadie Smith
#6. David Foster Wallace: We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading - when really all it's done is given us the really precious gift of making our job harder.
David Lipsky
#7. Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
Jonathan Franzen
#8. David Foster Wallace: I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me.
David Lipsky
#9. And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something
David Foster Wallace
David Lipsky
#10. He [David Foster Wallace] compares raising children to raising books, you should take pride in the work you do inside a family and not from how they make out in the world. "It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you," is what he says.
David Lipsky
#11. While Max appears to greatly admire Wallace as a writer and feel compassion for him as a man, he is never starry-eyed, or pulls his punches. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is as illuminating, multifaceted, and serious an estimation of David Foster Wallace's life and work as we can hope to find.
Elissa Schappell
#12. My occupation has been a great deal with David Foster Wallace, and he didn't manage it, and he was very much looking for something that isn't totally selfish, and finding meaning. It's a struggle.
Tom Courtenay
#13. The reality is that dying isn't bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective.
- David Foster Wallace "Good Old Neon" (2004)
David Foster Wallace
#14. David Foster Wallace: There's so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.
David Lipsky
#15. David Foster Wallace: Because 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 then.
David Lipsky
#16. There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hotpink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork.
- David Foster Wallace, "Big Red Son" (1998)
David Foster Wallace
#17. I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.
Ben Fountain
#18. Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.
Harold Bloom
#19. Work ethic and this determination is all part of escaping the depressive side. Of course I'm manic depressive, maybe not to the degree that Exley was, but I think all writers are. There are highs and lows. Look at David Foster Wallace.
T.C. Boyle
#20. I think my heart always goes out to men at the peak of their celebrity who checked out. There's such an odd, horrible trend in my lifetime for it - Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Alexander McQueen, Heath Ledger.
Chuck Palahniuk
#21. David (David Foster Wallace) had a caffeine social gift: Her was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake - he acted on other people like a slug of coffee - so they're the five most sleepless days I every spent with anyone.
David Lipsky
#22. I love those adult writers with the pranking ethos, [Don] DeLillo and [Donald] Barthelme and David Foster Wallace. I don't see any reason not to bring those kinds of influences to bear on books for children.
Mac Barnett
#23. I like David Foster Wallace. But if you type David Foster Wallace into OkCupid, it's a shitshow.
Moira Weigel
#24. Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.
Giles Foden
#25. Here is the truth - actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.
- David Foster Wallace, from The Pale King
David Foster Wallace
#26. The character who was like me he died at 46, even it was 2008 year so far his name was David Foster Wallace.
Deyth Banger
#27. 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
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
David Foster Wallace
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong.
David Foster Wallace
#53. 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
#54. 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
#56. No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison.
David Foster Wallace
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. A "game" that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent.
David Foster Wallace
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.
David Foster Wallace
#70. Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.
David Foster Wallace
#71. I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.
David Foster Wallace
#72. 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
#73. Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth
David Foster Wallace
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.
David Foster Wallace
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#82. I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.
David Foster Wallace
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
#88. 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
#89. I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
David Foster Wallace
#95. You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster Wallace
#97. 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
#98. 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
#100. 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
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