Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.

The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.

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

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?

I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

I read, I say. I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it. My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk.

Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est. (Roughly, They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.)

Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.