Quotes from David Foster Wallace

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

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.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a tree...Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often.

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.

I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.

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.

Every love story is a ghost story.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

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.

K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality," they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.