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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.

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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More quotes by 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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Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
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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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.
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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She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
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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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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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.
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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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
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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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.
David Foster Wallace
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The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
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