Quote

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.

David Foster Wallace

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Life
Sharing
Changes
Reader
Outside
Story
Idea
Stories
Ideas
Keen

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

Image
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.
David Foster Wallace
Image
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
David Foster Wallace
Image
There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
David Foster Wallace
Image
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
David Foster Wallace
Image
What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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
Image
I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.
David Foster Wallace
Image
...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
David Foster Wallace
Image
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
David Foster Wallace
Image
There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.
David Foster Wallace
Image
There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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
Image
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
Image
She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
David Foster Wallace
Image
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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
Image
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
Image
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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
Image
I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
David Foster Wallace