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American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
David Foster Wallace
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David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
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More quotes by David Foster Wallace
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
David Foster Wallace
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
David Foster Wallace
Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.
David Foster Wallace
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
David Foster Wallace
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
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
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.
David Foster Wallace
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier).
David Foster Wallace
If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
David Foster Wallace
Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
David Foster Wallace
I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.
David Foster Wallace
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
Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.
David Foster Wallace
Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
David Foster Wallace
Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
David Foster Wallace
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
David Foster Wallace
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
David Foster Wallace
The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
David Foster Wallace
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
David Foster Wallace
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
David Foster Wallace
