Quote

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.

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
Someone
Stays
Give
Mentally
Giving
Cross
Torturing
Crosses
Insomniac
Dog
Dyslexic
Question
Mario
Whether
Agnostic
Night
Unwilling

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The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
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every failure is also a victory.
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You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
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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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I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
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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.
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Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
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She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
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You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
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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 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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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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