Quotes from David Foster Wallace

I guess a bit part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

an indicative transposition like 'I'm here But For the Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in.

He said he didn't think Lenore should go to the G.O.D. Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that, he said, People don't go to a place like that to look for other people. That's the opposite of the whole concept that's behind the thing.

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché. So yet another layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special, that is was uniquely my fault because I was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow.

It was made to fail, born to be co-opted and subsumed into the junky ferrywake of media's coaching.

It's an urban November P.M.: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy grass, brittle bushes, gap-toothed trees. The rising moon looks like it doesn't feel very well.

As a rule, almost all of them are Midwesterners...This area of the country, what are we to say of this area of the country, Ms. Beadsman?...Both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extremity. Corn, a steady waning complex of heavy industry, and sports. What are we to say? We feed and stoke and supply a nation much of which doesn't know we exist. A nation we tend to be decades behind, culturally and intellectually. What are we to say about it?

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.

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

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.

She is silk in a bed of mail-order satin. Complete and seamless, an egg of sexual muscle. My motions atop her are dislocated, frantic, my lone interstice a trans-cultural spice of encouragement I smell with my spine. As, inside it, I go, I cry out to a god whose absence I have never felt to keenly.

People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise.

Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.

An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This

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

Advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and getting the joke, respectively).

Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool -- it's the same beast.

People hate people, not freedom.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

When you're meeting a whole lot of new people and having to do things you're in—I'm in a constant low-level state of anxiety. Which produces adrenaline, and kind of shuts down—there's a difference between short-term, people-based anxiety. And sort of deep, existential, you know, fear, that you feel all the way down to your butthole. And that, I, that's…that's what I'll have when I'm alone.

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

Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.