Top 100 Wallace Quotes
#1. Jessie Wallace was the first time I erupted. She was late, she was young. She's not like that any more. I lost my temper. It was silly and I burst into tears and ran up to the producer. I said I had been terrible and amateur.
Barbara Windsor
#2. Or Nick Park," I say craftily. "You know? The Wallace and Gromit man?" "Ah!" says Tarkie, perking up. "The Wrong Trousers. Now, that was a jolly good film.
Sophie Kinsella
#3. More and more I knew my budding world was ruined if he were free in it. As a specimen Mr. Wallace might be my pride. Glory to him in a jar. But free! Better to release the sweet moving tiger or the delicate snake, the monumental elephant. I was just a castaway to be devoured.
William H Gass
#4. As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.
Stephen Gaghan
#5. America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied.
D.T. Max
#6. Coyote: A small canid (Canis latrans) native to western North America that is closely related to the American wolf and whose cry has often been compared to that of Sippie Wallace and Janis Joplin, amongst others.
Sherman Alexie
#7. This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.
{The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer's 'excellent expression' in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul 1866).}
Herbert Spencer
#8. Mr. Wallace, would you please repeat what you recall that this Dylan Jones chap told you. Particularly about what he claimed is needed to free up your inheritance
James Ignizio
#9. [On Vice-President Henry A. Wallace:] Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney.
Clare Boothe Luce
#10. I, of course, took the opportunity to interpose with pigheaded Wallace pride, 'I am not English, you ignorant Jerry bastard, I am a SCOT.
Elizabeth Wein
#11. Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?
Madeleine L'Engle
#12. But I think people see 'Wallace and Gromit' as something akin to an elderly couple. These two know each other so well. Nothing can split them apart.
Nick Park
#13. Every man dies, not every man really lives" ... William Wallace
H.E. Kline
#14. Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.
Dana Gioia
#15. Wallace was just the sort who blends into the background of the school photo (or the greeting line at the cotillion) but who, with the passage of time, increasingly stands out against the lapses in character around him.
Amor Towles
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. I think we all have a Wallace and Gromit inside us. Wallace is the part that has wild plans. Gromit is the sensible side, reining you in.
Nick Park
#20. I like David Foster Wallace. But if you type David Foster Wallace into OkCupid, it's a shitshow.
Moira Weigel
#22. My body gets excited without my permission, and it's not okay. It's out of control. I don't like out of control, but I like Wallace.
Francesca Zappia
#23. 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
#24. I've always been more of a nerdy, academic type. I loved 'Star Wars' growing up. I have three older brothers, so they were a big influence on me. We loved 'Danger Mouse,' and we love 'Monty Python'. We loved any kind of British comedy and 'Wallace and Gromit' and all of that stuff.
Mara Wilson
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Wallace Stevens: the Platonist celebrates endless change, but with regret.
Mason Cooley
#29. The ultimate self-effacement
is not the pretense of the minimal,
but the jocular considerations of the maximal
in the manner of Wallace Stevens.
Mark Strand
#31. Comics are so full of amazing work. And I can't look at a drawing of a woman without thinking of, for instance, Wallace Wood and his amazing way of capturing beauty.
Frank Miller
#32. I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".
Keith Carter
#33. Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.
Harold Bloom
#34. Yet Wallace and other segregationists created an inflamed environment in which a confused but also ambitious man like Ray could think it was permissible, perhaps even noble, to murder King. The signals Ray was picking up enabled him to believe that society would smile on his crime. What
Hampton Sides
#35. And you were always nothing but slime, Henry Wallace. Fancy trash
Gwenn Wright
#36. You're full of contradictions, Ms. Wallace."
I looked up at him and arched a brow. "I'm a girl. That's part of the job description, Mr. Maxfield.
Tammara Webber
#37. Until I was four years old I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth of the river of that name.
Simon Newcomb
#38. After I started getting criticism for doing 'Big Brother,' someone told me that Hugh Downs used to host 'Concentration' and Mike Wallace used to do 'The Big Surprise.' I thought, Huh, maybe that door isn't sealed shut if I want to do '60 Minutes' one day.
Julie Chen
#39. A man I admire and respect - Congressman John Lewis, an American hero, made allegations that Sarah Palin and I were somehow associated with the worst chapter in American history, segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace. That, to me, was so hurtful.
John McCain
#40. Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory! Now 's the day and now 's the hour; See the front o' battle lour.
Robert Burns
#41. I'm always there at home thinking of Wallace and Gromit ideas.
Nick Park
#42. Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled ... I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.
Charles Darwin
#43. I guess maybe the only time I met George Wallace was when - at a boy scout meeting in Montgomery, and he met 10 or 15 of us from different areas. I'm not sure why I was there.
Jeff Sessions
#44. 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
#45. Just because something's damaged doesn't mean it shouldn't be treated with respect.'
'Ad,' Wallace said, 'it's a coffee table, not an orphan.
Sarah Dessen
#46. I think Wallace Hall is an imbecile.
Joe Jamail
#47. In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. - WALLACE STEVENS, OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS
Rebecca Solnit
#48. Besides, even if you went all the way, what would you be? Feather-weight champion of the world. Who gives a shit? I doubt you can even get a credit card based on that.
Marsellus Wallace
Quentin Tarantino
#49. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#50. At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.
George Clooney
#51. I'm William Wallace, and the rest of you will be spared. Go back to England and tell them ... Scotland is free!
William Wallace
#52. I wasn't a very good waitress, always spilling things on people and forgetting things. I once spilled ashes all over Mike Wallace's table.
Tracy Pollan
#53. What's Mr. Dimming's first name?" "Wallace!" We all cracked up at that.
Sharon M. Draper
#54. Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.
Hal Duncan
#55. Irving Wallace wrote a bestselling novel, The Man, in the 1960s about a black man becoming president of the United States. We thought that such a possibility was thousands of years in the future. Some people may still have some difficulty with the idea, but that's a major cultural meme shift.
Wayne Dyer
#56. It was a page he had Found in the handbook Of heartbreak. Wallace Stevens, "Madame la Fleurie," Collected Poems I
Cornelia Funke
#57. Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Sell cars long enough and you'll see: Nobody's all that original. Any lone weirdo comes from a big nest of weirdos. What's weird is, you go to some pigsty village in Slovakia, and suddenly even Andy Warhol makes perfect sense.
Chuck Palahniuk
#58. When we first sold the Wallace and Gromit shorts to America, people suggested we get rid of the strange British accents and put clear American voices on them, and we held out.
Nick Park
#59. Wallace Stegner once wrote that the lessons of life amount to scar tissue.
Michael McGarrity
#60. 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
#61. One must have a mind of winter, I thought, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
- from The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens
Robert B. Parker
#62. 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
#63. A WRINKLE IN TIME is one of my favorite books of all time. I've read it so often, I know it by heart. Meg Murry was my hero growing up. I wanted glasses and braces and my parents to stick me in an attic bedroom. And I so wanted to save Charles Wallace from IT.
Meg Cabot
#64. David Foster Wallace: There's so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.
David Lipsky
#65. I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.
David Lehman
#66. 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
#67. It is the ultimate metafictional act, not homicide but suicide. (Wallace would say that one of the problems of metafiction is that there is no difference.)
D.T. Max
#68. The part of Mike Wallace drew me to the movie because I thought, what an outrageous part to play.
Christopher Plummer
#69. The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state's contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace's, Martin Luther King's, and Bear Bryant's.
Paul Theroux
#70. But there was something about Dash Wallace that felt safe. Maybe it was the way he'd shut down all the fuck talk to hear what I had to say, or maybe it was the way he never made me feel as though he was doing me a favor by wanting me.
C.D. Reiss
#71. To come in and win three races already this year and maybe set a record by winning four is pretty unique. But guys like Mark Martin, Rusty Wallace and these guys are not wanting that to happen.
Dale Earnhardt
#72. 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
#73. In a shadowy place something white flew up. It was a heron, and it went away over the dark treetops. William Wallace followed it with his eyes and Brucie clapped his hands, but Virgil gave a sigh, as if he knew that when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign.
("The Wide Net")
Eudora Welty
#74. 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
#75. I hate it!" Charles Wallace cried passionately. "I hate the Dark Thing!
Madeleine L'Engle
#77. 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
#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
#79. I've turned over a new leaf. On TV, Kenny Wallace said I was a pessimist after Charlotte, so I got mad. Now I am so excited about coming back that I just can't stand it. I wish we were starting tomorrow and I'm going to win! That's the new me.
Mark Martin
#80. I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens
R.S. Thomas
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#86. Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook),
Bill Bryson
#87. To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
#88. The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.
Calvin Trillin
#89. David Foster Wallace: I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me.
David Lipsky
#90. (Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
Harold Bloom
#91. It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.
Lewis Thomas
#92. I went back over the sketch books I'd filled at Sheffield for ideas and discovered Wallace and Gromit, except Gromit was a cat then. I made them into Plasticene shapes and started 'A Grand Day Out.' It took me longer than I expected.
Nick Park
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Wallace and Gromit's contraptions are created purely for gags, but we all have the urge to invent - especially children. If they're bored, kids will make something from cardboard boxes, yoghurt pots, tape and elastic bands. Often, those constructions are the best.
Nick Park
#97. Mike Wallace's interviews may make great television, but they don't produce great evidence.
Errol Morris
#98. There are only two living American authors fully deserving of the Nobel Prize. One is Lewis Mumford. The other is Wallace Stegner, whose novels and essays provide us a comprehensive portrait of industrial society in all its glittering corruption and radiant evil.
Edward Abbey
#99. Among the roles I've played on stage, television and in films were politicos as diverse as Abe Lincoln, Juan Peron, Herman Goering, George Wallace and both Roosevelts.
Bob Gunton
#100. Despite the man's intimidating mountain-man looks, Wallace dated men, women and some people who seemed to skate between genders.
Victoria Dahl
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