Skip to content

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

Another quote →

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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?

All David Foster Wallace quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: David Foster Wallace (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.