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I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.

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
Someone
Thinking
Like
People
Assholes
Sounding
Terrified
Bright
Thinks

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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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I am not what you see and hear.
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I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
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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.
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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
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I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
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Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.
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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
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One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
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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.
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I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
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So yo then man what's your story?
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Mediocrity is contextual.
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I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
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But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.
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It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.
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...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
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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.
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I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
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