David Foster Wallace Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Perfectionism #Fidelity

“We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Math #Psychology #Important

“You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Loneliness #Writing #Thinking

“I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Book #School #Office

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Inspirational #Book #Reading

“If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Philosophical #Character #Mean

“Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Lying #Love Is #Attachment

“I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Character #Thinking #Ideas

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Bipolar #Secret #Way

“I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Jobs #Couple #Writing

“In reality, 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

#Home #Reality #Voting

“My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Technology #Years #Two

“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

#Inspirational #Graduation #Sacrifice

“Many people in America throw the term "fascism" around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#America #People #Facts

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Odd

“America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Country #America #Long

“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.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Enjoy #Persons

“Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Passports

“Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Writing #Fiction #Way

“I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Fun #Thinking #Littles

“Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Thinking #Important #Attention

“The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Thinking #Way #Linear

“she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Suicide #Thinking #Firsts

“I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Night #Sound #Fans

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Choices #Atheism #Adults

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Dog #Night #Giving

“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

#Fire #Trying #Imagine

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Artist #Reality #Vision

“If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers ... becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Reading #Writing #Hard Times

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
-- David Foster Wallace

#Anxiety #Marketing #Advertising