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

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
David Foster Wallace
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We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
David Foster Wallace
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It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
David Foster Wallace
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The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.
David Foster Wallace
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You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
David Foster Wallace
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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
David Foster Wallace
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If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
David Foster Wallace
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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
David Foster Wallace
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I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
David Foster Wallace
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
David Foster Wallace
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I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are I cannot look at them they are the sun to me.
David Foster Wallace
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Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
David Foster Wallace
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The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
David Foster Wallace