Dfw Quotes

It's just much easier with dogs. You don't get laid; but you also don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time. ~ David Lipsky

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

If I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me. ~ David Foster Wallace

DFW: I think there are different people on the page than in real life. I do six to eight drafts of everything that I do. Um, I am probably not the smartest writer going. But I also
and I know, OK, this is gonna fit right into the persona
I work really really hard. I'm really
you give me twenty-four hours? If we'd done this interview through the mail? I could be really really really smart. I'm not all that fast. And I'm really self-conscious. And I get confused really easily. When I'm in a room by myself alone, and have enough time, I can be really really smart. And people are different that way. You know what I mean? I may not
I don't think I'm quite as smart, one-on-one with people, when I'm self-conscious, and I'm really really confused. And it's like, My dream would be for you to write this up, and then to send it to me, and I get to rewrite all my quotes to you. Which of course you'll never do ... ~ David Lipsky

When something large and oncoming passed, the windshield's big rectangle was for a moment incandesced and opaque with water, which the wipers heaved mightily to displace. ~ David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest' is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. ~ Harold Bloom

David (David Foster Wallace) had a caffeine social gift: Her was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake - he acted on other people like a slug of coffee - so they're the five most sleepless days I every spent with anyone. ~ David Lipsky

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men's Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He's needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O'Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg's shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs. ~ David Foster Wallace

He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent. ~ Harold Bloom

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in ... the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. ~ David Foster Wallace

I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. ~ David Foster Wallace

The point of books was to combat loneliness ~ David Lipsky

Interviewer ...In the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing -- flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. -- is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In da ~ David Foster Wallace

Lenore, it's simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fiber of my being. The thought of things about you, concerning you, troubling you, that I don't know about, makes blood run from my eyes, on the inside. ~ David Foster Wallace

But he'd also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed. ~ David Foster Wallace

JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the ... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so ...
LENORE: What in God's name are you doing?
JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior.
LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that?
JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore. ~ David Foster Wallace

This was the first thing I ever said, "All right, I'm gonna try to do the very best I can." Instead of doing this, "All right, I'll work at like three-quarters speed, and then I can always figure that if I just hadn't been a fuckup, the book coulda been really good." You know that defense system? You write the paper the night before, so if it doesn't get a great grade, you know that it could've been better.
And this worked
I worked as hard as I could on this. And in a weird way, you might think that would make me more nervous about whether people would like it. But there was this weird
you know like when you work out really well, there's this kind of tiredness that's real pleasant, and it's sort of placid. ~ David Lipsky

Sometimes, when I don't think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that I am going to be able to lead a Normal and Productive Life as a lawyer or something here on planet Trillaphon, once I get so I can read again.
( ... ) Being far away sort of helps with respect to the Bad Thing. Except that is just highly silly when you think about what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really ~ David Foster Wallace

Why can't DFW compete like San Francisco does with Oakland, like Miami does with Fort Lauderdale, and like Chicago O'Hare does with Midway? ~ John Ensign