Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists.

Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her, his swollen eyes red and his face sagging so that its slack folds maybe touched, limply, the folds of her own loose sagging face as it sloshed back and forth on his pillow, its mouth working dryly. The thought was repellent.

It'd be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.

It's the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour.

At the end of the day the hatred for all of the work is just part of the work

Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there's such a thing as love, and whether it's redemptive, become vastly different. And the structures with which you can communicate those dilemmas, or have characters struggle with them, seem to become appropriate and then inappropriate again and so on.

Seminal." He keeps saying it. "Seminal, seminal.

The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.

Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text. Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there "is" no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

That you just naturally want what we, your fathers, work night and day to make sure you want? Grow up, for Christ's sake. Join the world. We produce what makes you want to need to consume. Advertising. Laxatives. HMO's. Baking soda. Insurance. Your fears are built—and your wishes, on that foundation.

Something happens to a novel as it ages, but what? It doesn't ripen or deepen in the manner of cheese and wine, and it doesn't fall apart, at least not figuratively. Fiction has no half-life. We age alongside the novels we've read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating. Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads.

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

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.

Last night I went and saw Good Will Hunting, which takes place not exactly where I used to live, in Boston, but pretty darn close, so I've been all flush with nostalgia for it. I was in Boston from summer of '89 until spring of '92... ...I think it's the ultimate nerd fantasy movie. It's a bit of a fairy tale, but I enjoyed it a lot. Minnie Driver is really to fall sideways for. And there's all sorts of cool stuff. It's actually a movie that's got calculus in it. It takes place in Boston.

Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only 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.

Hal says, 'In a nutshell, what we're talking about here is loneliness.

On one level my attention was intently focused on her voice and story. On another level I - it was if my mind was having a garage sale.

Madame Psychosis' name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy's name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.

That her will and wishes had opposed my own just a little more. 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.

What if, Veals's spokeswoman ruminated aloud, what if the viewer could become her/his own programming director; what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?

and I emerge so icky and befouled and cross-eyed from the guy's right hook that I blow what should have been a very legitimate shot at the title in the Men's Best Legs Contest, in which I end up placing third but am told later I would have won the whole thing except for the scowl, swollen and strabismic right eye, and askew swimcap that formed a contextual backdrop too downright goofy to let the full force of my gams' shapeliness come through to the judges.

their faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning.

I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.

My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.