Quotes from David Lipsky

But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists.

We do some TV talk. He loves Seinfeld, thinks Friends is "a little gooey.

He had finished and collected the three years of drafts [of Infinite Jest] , and finally sat down and typed the whole thing. Wallace didn't really type; he input the giant thing twice, with one finger. "But a really fast finger.

I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we're smart. And that there's stuff that TV and movies—although they're great at certain things—cannot give us.

a good book teaches the reader how to read it.

Yeah, there's stuff that really good fiction can do that other forms of art can't do as well. And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin' over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate conversation between two consciences.

David thought books existed to stop you from feeling lonely.

David Foster Wallace: 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.

Remember that nothing that's any good works by itself, just to please you. You got to make the damn thing work. . . . Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

In one of Updike's stories about Henry Bech, someone tells the novelist that his books "are weeping, but there are no tears." "Troubling Love" is soggy with tears — and the blank mood that follows a good long cry — but you can't isolate the source of the weeping.

What's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true? —DR. SHERWOOD ROWLAND

History is full of stories that aren't actually true. —LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON

The story this book tells is about the people who made our world; then the people who realized there might be a problem; then the people who lied about that problem.

I end up drinking ten or twelve Diet Rites a day

David Foster Wallace: Now, if I don't develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure, and allow myself to go out and, you know, grocery shop and pay the rent? I don't know about you, but I'm gonna have to leave the

David Foster Wallace: Now, if I don't develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure, and allow myself to go out and, you know, grocery shop and pay the rent? I don't know about you, but I'm gonna have to leave the planet.

Because we're gonna get so interested in entertainment that we're not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment...Where the country could very well shut down and die, and it won't be anybody else doin' it to us, we will have done it to ourselves.

or like Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way.

roles in True Romance and Crimson Tide—is a young, pre-Sopranos James Gandolfini. Glory, Marshall Herskowitz, 1989. Broadcast News, James L. Brooks, 1986.

David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.

And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something -- David Foster Wallace

My ambition is to not embarrass myself--which, if you know me, is a pretty serious ambition.

David Foster Wallace: There's so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.

David Lipsky: Why aren't you married at thirty-four? David Foster Wallace: You first. David Lipsky: Um-I think it's hard to fill that role...to cast it and to fill it when you know it's for thirty or forty years...someone who, whatever mental landscape you're in, they're going to be in it too, you need someone who'll fit any landscape you can imagine.