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David Foster Wallace Quotes
1962–2008 United States
David Foster Wallace (21 February 1962 – 12 September 2008) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works include The Broom of the System (novel), Infinite Jest (novel), The Girl With Curious Hair (short story collection), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (short story collection), A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (essay collection), and the posthumously-published The Pale King (novel) and Both Flesh and Not (essay collection).
United States Academics Essayists Novelists Short story writers Also known as: Wallace, David Foster, Infinite Jest
Random David Foster Wallace quote
33 quotes
It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating.
John Ziegler, who is a talk-radio host of unflagging industry, broad general knowledge, mordant wit, and extreme conviction, makes a particular specialty of media criticism.
Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don't have names.
The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler's job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible.
Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.
Consider the Lobster (2007)
Not unlike urban gangs, police, carnival workers and certain other culturally marginalized guilds, the US porn industry is occluded and insular in a way that makes it seem like high school.
Consider the Lobster (2007)
That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
Infinite Jest (1996)
I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.
After a few weeks of this she'd spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire.
Infinite Jest (1996)
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
Infinite Jest (1996)
My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
Infinite Jest (1996)
'You know what your problem is, Hallie?' 'I have just one problem?'
Infinite Jest (1996)
That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.
Infinite Jest (1996)
The John Ziegler Show is the first local, nonsyndicated late-night program that KFI has aired in a long time. It's something of a gamble for everyone involved. Ten o'clock to one qualifies as late at night in southern California, where hardly anything reputable's open after nine.
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words."
The Pale King (2011)
Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.
Infinite Jest (1996)
For obvious reasons, critics of political talk radio concern themselves mainly with the programs' content. Talk station management, on the other hand, tends to think of content as a subset of personality, of how stimulating a given host is.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
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