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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

David Foster Wallace

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David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Simply
Upped
Intensified
Stakes
Tendencies
Consequences
Nuclear
Consequence
Weapons

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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
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Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic? I give. You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
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Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
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Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.
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This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
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It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
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It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.
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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
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It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.
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The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
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But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.
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I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
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I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.
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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
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