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All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.

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
Didn
Aesthetic
Invented
Shortsighted
Project
Childishness
Blame
Symptom
Projects
Manhattan
Simply
Symptoms
Saying
Invent
Another
Aggression

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I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
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Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
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What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
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I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
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People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
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I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.
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It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
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The point of books is to combat loneliness.
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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 read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've 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.
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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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Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
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...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
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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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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
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sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
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Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
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My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.
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