Quotes by David Foster Wallace

About David Foster Wallace:

David Foster Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicat...

David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace

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 m...

David Foster Wallace

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme...

David Foster Wallace

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.

David Foster Wallace

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in f...

David Foster Wallace

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and sel...

David Foster Wallace

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly mo...

David Foster Wallace

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.10 10 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author's...

David Foster Wallace

But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anythin...

David Foster Wallace

There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

David Foster Wallace

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to ...

David Foster Wallace

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?

David Foster Wallace

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? ...

David Foster Wallace

Nada disso tem a ver com moralidade, religião, dogmas ou grandes questões sobre a vida após a morte. A verdade com V maiúsculo diz respeito à vida antes da morte. Diz respeito a chegar aos trinta, ou quem sabe aos cinquenta, sem querer dar um ti...

David Foster Wallace

I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.

David Foster Wallace

The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.

David Foster Wallace

Julie le ha dicho a Faye que cree que los amantes pasan por tres fases distintas cuando empiezan a conocerse bien. Primero intercambian anécdotas y gustos. Después se cuentan las cosas en que creen. Y luego cada uno examina la relación entre lo qu...

David Foster Wallace

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

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

David Foster Wallace

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.

David Foster Wallace

Author Bio

  • NameDavid Foster Wallace
  • DescriptionFiction writer, essayist
  • BornFebruary 21, 1962
  • DiedSeptember 12, 2008
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksInfinite Jest; The Pale King; A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again; Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program