Quotes from David Foster Wallace

As William (anti-death) Gass observes in Habitations of the world , critics can try to erase or over-define the author into anonimity for all sorts of technical, political, and philosophical reasons, and this 'anonimity' may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it .

extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I'm lifesick)

A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.

Popular culture is the symbolic representation of what people already believe .

Entertainment's chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can't tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.

But fiction-writers tend at the same time to be terribly sef-conscious . Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people.

La belleza no es un objetivo de los deportes competitivos, pero los deportes de alto nivel son escenarios privilegiados para la expresión de la belleza humana. La relación se aproxima a la que existe entre la valentía y la guerra

The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrums hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.

In our post-1950s, inseparable-from-TV association pool, brand loyalty really is synecdochic of character.

Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.

It just makes me a person that's really exhausted a couple other ways to live, you know? And really taken them, taken them to their conclusion. Which for me was a pink room, with no furniture and a drain in the center of the floor.

Die wirklich wichtige Freiheit erfordert Aufmerksamkeit, und Offenheit und Disziplin und Mühe und die Empathie, andere Menschen wirklich ernst zu nehmen und Opfer für sie zu bringen, wieder und wieder, auf unendlich verschiedene Weisen, völlig unsexy, Tag für Tag.

exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

We 8 are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.

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

A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that the other camps 9 are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

This Garner is an interesting guy. He's both a lawyer and a usage expert (which seems a bit like being both a narcotics wholesaler and a DEA agent).

La narrativa o mueve montañas o es aburrida; o mueve montañas o se sienta sobre su propio culo

wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it.

At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby.

The American daydream, what made Us great: make a concession, take a stand.

The big hair was red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zy-gomatics indescribable and her eyes an extra-natural HD green.

the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.