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

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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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.
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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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We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
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We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life outside the story changes the story.
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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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It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
David Foster Wallace
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The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
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I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
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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.
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If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
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I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
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Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
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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.
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The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
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One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
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I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
David Foster Wallace
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Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
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Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
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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.
David Foster Wallace