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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.

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
Fiction
Human
Humans

More quotes by 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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Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
David Foster Wallace
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Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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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
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
David Foster Wallace
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Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
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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Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
David Foster Wallace
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The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
David Foster Wallace
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...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
David Foster Wallace
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Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
David Foster Wallace
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I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.
David Foster Wallace
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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
David Foster Wallace
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I find in myself a need to get very away.
David Foster Wallace
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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
David Foster Wallace
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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
David Foster Wallace
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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
David Foster Wallace
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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'
David Foster Wallace