David Foster Wallace Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational David Foster Wallace quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

so full of himself he could have shit limbs. — David Foster Wallace

It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. — David Foster Wallace

Abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. — David Foster Wallace

you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That — David Foster Wallace

Mediocrity is contextual. — David Foster Wallace

Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to. — David Foster Wallace

You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment. — David Foster Wallace

Capital T-truth is about life before death. — David Foster Wallace

I like David Foster Wallace. But if you type David Foster Wallace into OkCupid, it's a shitshow. — Moira Weigel

In life, the microphone passes your lips but once ... you had better be ready to sing. — David Foster Wallace

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die. — David Foster Wallace

Mr. Incandenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we've had enough shit out of you. — David Foster Wallace

I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy. — David Foster Wallace

Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor. — David Foster Wallace

I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers ... — David Foster Wallace

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. — David Foster Wallace

Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving? — David Foster Wallace

That everybody's sneeze sounds different. — David Foster Wallace

The drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. — David Foster Wallace

...giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns. — David Foster Wallace

I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting. — David Foster Wallace

The trees' bony fingers make spell-casting gestures in the wind as they pass. — David Foster Wallace

Just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor. — David Foster Wallace

Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria's Secret catalogue. — David Foster Wallace

I'm a typical American, half of me is dying to give myself away and the other half is continually rebelling. — David Foster Wallace

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. — David Foster Wallace

the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays. — David Foster Wallace

and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism. — David Foster Wallace

When he settles in with the tray and cartridge, the TP's viewer's digital display reads 1927h. — David Foster Wallace

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on. — David Foster Wallace

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today. — David Foster Wallace

The only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you. — David Foster Wallace

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

He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West Courts' fencing. — David Foster Wallace

De Tocqueville's thrust is that it's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of. — David Foster Wallace

To try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates. — David Foster Wallace

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males. — David Foster Wallace

Some answer or trick of the will: the ability not to think about it. What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine? — David Foster Wallace

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

So yo then man what's your story? — David Foster Wallace

Perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. — David Foster Wallace

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art. — David Foster Wallace

Because Tavis had been the one to take the lion's share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays' spectators in the stands, — David Foster Wallace

The other half is to dramatize that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be. — David Foster Wallace

Insects all business all the time. — David Foster Wallace

The inactive viewer's screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day. — David Foster Wallace

Tornadoes were, in out part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense. — David Foster Wallace

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them. — David Foster Wallace

Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you. — David Foster Wallace

And he can feel his heart going out into the world ... — David Foster Wallace

No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison. — David Foster Wallace

This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws. — David Foster Wallace

David Cronenberg's mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film. — David Foster Wallace

[The entire text of Infinite Jest.] — David Foster Wallace

If I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me. — David Foster Wallace

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not. — David Foster Wallace

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. — David Foster Wallace

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. — David Foster Wallace

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. — David Foster Wallace

Most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. — David Foster Wallace

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. — David Foster Wallace

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. — David Foster Wallace

Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian. — David Foster Wallace

That something smelled delicious!' I screamed. — David Foster Wallace

Still, though."
"Right. Exactly. — David Foster Wallace

It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict. — David Foster Wallace

The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? LENORE: — David Foster Wallace

There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be
a newsflash to you. — David Foster Wallace

I find in myself a need to get very away. — David Foster Wallace

Expectant. My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a — David Foster Wallace

Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying. — David Foster Wallace

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.
It is easier than you think. — David Foster Wallace

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace: There's so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us. — David Lipsky

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection. — David Foster Wallace

Breasts are uniformly zeppelinesque and in various perilous stages of semiconfinement. — David Foster Wallace

Do not underestimate objects. — David Foster Wallace

Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they're venal and weak it's because we are. — David Foster Wallace

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. — David Foster Wallace

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. — David Foster Wallace

Greater when one's mind has been exercised and thus — David Foster Wallace

-you can prove that there are exactly as many real numbers between 0 and 1 as between 0 and any other finite number you can think of. — David Foster Wallace

I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. — David Foster Wallace

One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for — David Foster Wallace

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? — David Foster Wallace

People hate people, not freedom. — David Foster Wallace

And just before 0145h. on 2 April Y.D.A.U., his wife arrived back home — David Foster Wallace

Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror. — David Foster Wallace

He'd cure himself by excess. — David Foster Wallace

He was trying to pay close attention to his surroundings as a way to avert thought and anxiety. — David Foster Wallace

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. — David Foster Wallace

He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see. — David Foster Wallace

But from special it's not very far to Alone. — David Foster Wallace

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop. — David Foster Wallace

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

[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

Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. — David Foster Wallace

desire is the sugar in human food. — David Foster Wallace

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

Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food. — David Foster Wallace