David Foster Wallace

“There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”

“The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.”

“Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...”

“You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do i...”

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

“The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable...”

“Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of i...”

“They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us here, but the fact is that religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's atheist's— arrogance, b...”

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.”

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and...”

“There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.”

“Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.”

“What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.”

“...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing, but Nothing...”

“I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.”

“How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?”

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to cho...”

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

“It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.”