Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That's probably as close to immortal as we'll ever get.

something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes.

the air over the table like the sparkling space just above a fresh-poured seltzer.

Believe what you want. I'm powerless over what you believe.

So listen -- one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice it's original height.

This by the way is known as Werther's Axiom, whereby quote The Intensity of a desire D is inversely proportional to the ease of D's gratification. Known also as Romance.

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

Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.

I'll gladly identify myself if you'll first simply explain what it is I'm identifying myself as. This is my position. You're requiring me to attest to facts I do not possess. The term for this is "duress."

LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.

Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime. Violence requires all different kinds of energy, and most drug addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what their professional crime lets them afford. Drug addicts are often burglars, therefore.

Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I'll show you a bullshit artist.

No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, overwhelming, powerful and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.

This, of course, is because today's postfeminist era is also today's postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what's really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we're all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and informed.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

You Can't Unring a Bell.

JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so... LENORE: What in God's name are you doing? JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior. LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that? JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.

Es muy raro sentir que añoras algo que ni siquiera estás seguro de conocer.

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.

it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

Good literature makes your head throb heartlike

Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV).

You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between.