Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
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
Thinking
People
Compelling
Smarter
Confusion
Stupidity
Writers
May
Think
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
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
It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
David Foster Wallace
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
David Foster Wallace
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
David Foster Wallace
Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
David Foster Wallace
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
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
Many people in America throw the term fascism around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.
David Foster Wallace
every failure is also a victory.
David Foster Wallace
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
David Foster Wallace
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
David Foster Wallace
My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.
David Foster Wallace
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
...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
David Foster Wallace
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
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
David Foster Wallace
