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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

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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
Thinking
People
Compelling
Smarter
Confusion
Stupidity
Writers
May
Think

More quotes by 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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...morning is the soul's night.
David Foster Wallace
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Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
David Foster Wallace
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That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
David Foster Wallace
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It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline Heart Breaker on her right buttock and a tiny hairless ole just left of her anus.
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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We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
David Foster Wallace
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
David Foster Wallace
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It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
David Foster Wallace
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I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.
David Foster Wallace
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...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
David Foster Wallace
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I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.' ... 'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.' 'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut.
David Foster Wallace
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This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
David Foster Wallace
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
David Foster Wallace
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The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
David Foster Wallace
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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
David Foster Wallace
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Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
David Foster Wallace
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In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
David Foster Wallace