Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Attention
People
Confuse
Paying
Tend
Intelligence
Authority
Unless
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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 you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.
David Foster Wallace
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
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
David Foster Wallace
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
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
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
David Foster Wallace
We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
David Foster Wallace
I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
David Foster Wallace
TV's real agenda is to be liked, because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this it's its sole raison.
David Foster Wallace
The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’
David Foster Wallace
Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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
In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
David Foster Wallace
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
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
I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
David Foster Wallace
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
