David Foster Wallace Quotes - Page 2

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How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.

Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.

...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.

Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?

Why not? Why not?Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?

My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

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