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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

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
Evaded
Fugue
Responsibility
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More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
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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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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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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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It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.
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Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
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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?
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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.
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Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
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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.
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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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....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
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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.
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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
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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.
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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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The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
David Foster Wallace