David Foster Wallace Quotes

A certain amount of the form-conscious stuff I write is trying - with whatever success - to do the opposite. It's supposed to be uneasy.
David Foster Wallace

Avoiding any reference to the pop would mean either being retrograde about what's "permissible" in serious art or else writing about some other world.
David Foster Wallace

Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me.
David Foster Wallace

But at some point "minimalist" style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by the critics. Now here come the crank-turners.
David Foster Wallace

But there's an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off.
David Foster Wallace

But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their readers, what readers need to expect from any kind of art.
David Foster Wallace

Even today, when people I don't know ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I'm "in English" or I "work free-lance."
David Foster Wallace

Fiction-writing's lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It's yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work.
David Foster Wallace

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
David Foster Wallace

For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.
David Foster Wallace

Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero.
David Foster Wallace

I 've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego.
David Foster Wallace

I don't seem to be able to call myself a writer. And terms like "postmodernist" or "surrealist" send me straight to the bathroom, I've got to tell you.
David Foster Wallace

I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what fiction's about.
David Foster Wallace

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
David Foster Wallace

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

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
David Foster Wallace

I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos.
David Foster Wallace

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
David Foster Wallace

I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because the big R's form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment.
David Foster Wallace

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

If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon.
David Foster Wallace

In a mass mediated nation, it's no longer North vs. South. It's under-thirty vs. over thirty.
David Foster Wallace

In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's rare.
David Foster Wallace

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That's what made the early postmodernists great artists.
David Foster Wallace

Irony's useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone.
David Foster Wallace

Is it essentially mimetic, to capture and order a protean reality? Or is it really supposed to be therapeutic in an Aristotelian sense?
David Foster Wallace

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

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.
David Foster Wallace

It might just be that simple.
David Foster Wallace

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.
David Foster Wallace

It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called "the click of a well-made box." Something like that. The word I always think of it as is "click."
David Foster Wallace

It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound.
David Foster Wallace

It's the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now.
David Foster Wallace

It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it."
David Foster Wallace

Maybe our touchstone now should be G. M. Hopkins, who made up his "own" set of formal constraints and then blew everyone's footwear off from inside them.
David Foster Wallace

Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon. Art's reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist.
David Foster Wallace

My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore's poetry or like DeLillo's "Libra" had done with other mediated myths.
David Foster Wallace

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

Observing a quantum phenomenon's been proven to alter the phenomenon. Fiction likes to ignore this fact's implications.
David Foster Wallace

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.
David Foster Wallace

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

Postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just kidding.
David Foster Wallace

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
David Foster Wallace

Raymond Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he's supposedly the inventor of modern U.S. minimalism. "Schools" of fiction are for crank-turners.
David Foster Wallace

Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text.
David Foster Wallace

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