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David Foster Wallace [1962-2008] American

Rank: 101
Writer, Novelist

David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, as well as a professor of English and creative writing.

Alone, Great

Quote	Tags	Rank
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.		101
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.	Great	102
This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.	Alone	103
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.		104
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.		105
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.		106
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.		107
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.		108
It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.		109
We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?		110
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.		111
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.		112
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.		113
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.		114
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.		115
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.		116
The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.		117
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life 'outside' the story changes the story.		118
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?		119
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.		120
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.		121
TV's 'real' agenda is to be 'liked,' because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.		122
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.		123
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.		124
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.		125
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.		126

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