Quotes from David Lipsky

David Foster Wallace: I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me.

The point of books was to combat loneliness

But the sort of—this confusion of permissions, or this idea that pleasure and comfort are the, are really the ultimate goal and meaning of life. I think we're starting to see a generation die … on the toxicity of that idea.

David Foster Wallace: We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading—when really all it's done is given us the really precious gift of making our job harder.

I'm talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable.

I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.

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.

Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.

David (David Foster Wallace) had a caffeine social gift: Her was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake - he acted on other people like a slug of coffee - so they're the five most sleepless days I every spent with anyone.

I'm not sure we're any better, but able to describe the attempt to track our wandering in circles in a way that perhaps somebody else can identify with. I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

He [David Foster Wallace] compares raising children to raising books, you should take pride in the work you do inside a family and not from how they make out in the world. "It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you," is what he says.

The way to finish the book is to turn down the volume on the stuff that's all about how other people react.

It's just much easier with dogs. You don't get laid; but you also don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time.

DFW: Well, when you're meeting a whole lot of new people and having to do things, you're in—I'm in a constant low-level state of anxiety. Which produces adrenaline, and kind of shuts down—there's a difference between short-term, people-based anxiety. And sort of deep, existential, you know, fear, that you feel kind of all the way down to your butthole. And that, I, that's … that's what I'll have when I'm alone.

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.

I finished and e-mailed to myself to see what it'd read like to open, and decided it looked a little loopy and that I'd been the right person to open it after all. I read him, thought about him, and I never saw him again except on television once.

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.