Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

Image
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
David Foster Wallace
Image
life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
David Foster Wallace
Image
That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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.
David Foster Wallace
Image
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
David Foster Wallace
Image
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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.
David Foster Wallace
Image
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
David Foster Wallace
Image
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
David Foster Wallace
Image
No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
David Foster Wallace
Image
I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are I cannot look at them they are the sun to me.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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.
David Foster Wallace
Image
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
David Foster Wallace
Image
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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.
David Foster Wallace
Image
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
David Foster Wallace