Latest David Foster Wallace Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they're going to get a C in my class, and so my classes tend to have like four students in them. It's really a lot of fun.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fun, Illinois, Class

  Source: blankonblank.org

• I wasn't all that attracted to writing originally. I read a great deal. My parents read a great deal. I do know that as my interest in tennis waned, my interest in academics increased. I mean, I started doing my homework in high school and discovering that it was somewhat fun. And then in college I barely even played on the team because just classes were much more interesting.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fun, Team, Writing

  Source: blankonblank.org

• I mean the people who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean you don't date, you go to bed at a certain time, you eat certain ways, you practice 10-12 hours a day. And I mean, the difference between practicing three hours a day and practicing 12 hours a day is everything. And I certainly never - I never trained seriously after the age of 16.

  David Foster Wallace

  Mean, Practice, Play

  Source: blankonblank.org

• I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.

  David Foster Wallace

  Sports, Children, Interesting

  Source: blankonblank.org

• A lot of writers tired of doing kind of hip, slick, funny, dark, exploding hypocrisy, underlining once again the point that life is a farce and we're all in it for ourselves and that the point of life is to amass as much money/fame/sexual gratification, you know, whatever your personal thing is, and that everything else is just glitter or PR image - that we're tired of sort of doing that stuff over and over again.

  David Foster Wallace

  Tired, Dark, Hypocrisy

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

• There's a certain kind of neurological makeup that goes along with being a writer, and having been in the room with a few other writers at the same time, it's rather wearing to be around. And it does - there is a kind of hypervigilance about it. Unfortunately it's got disadvantages. If you turn that hypervigilance on yourself and, for instance, whether or not you have a pimple on the end of your nose, it can get really depressing.

  David Foster Wallace

  Depressing, Makeup, Doe

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

• The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.

  David Foster Wallace

  Giving, Arches, Lines

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

• If you're writing fiction, you're dealing with characters who, themselves, will have heartfelt sentiments but who, themselves, live in this culture right now and thus face all the impediments to sort of dealing with those parts of their lives that, you know, that we did. So it would be not only silly but unrealistic to have a character saying that kind of stuff.

  David Foster Wallace

  Silly, Writing, Character

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

• Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers.

  David Foster Wallace

  Self, Ethos, People

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

• Happiness is not like we were walking around fingering razor blades or anything like that. But it just sort of seems as if - we sort of knew how happy our parents were, and we would compare our lives with our parents and see that, at least on the surface or according to the criteria that the culture lays down for a successful, happy life, we were actually doing better than a lot of them were.

  David Foster Wallace

  Successful, Happy Life, Parent

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

• The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.

  David Foster Wallace

  Couple, Sacrifice, Ideas

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

• There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

  David Foster Wallace

  Vacation, Anxiety, Kind

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

• I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

  David Foster Wallace

  Book, School, Office

  Interview with Dave Eggers, www.believermag.com. November 2003.

• We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life.

  David Foster Wallace

  Math, Psychology, Important

  Interview with Dave Eggers, www.believermag.com. November 2003.

• I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

  David Foster Wallace

  Character, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.nybooks.com

• If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.

  David Foster Wallace

  Philosophical, Mean, Character

  Source: www.nybooks.com

• I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Couple, Writing

  Source: www.nybooks.com

• My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.

  David Foster Wallace

  Technology, Two, Years

  Source: www.nybooks.com

• America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.

  David Foster Wallace

  Country, America, Long

  Source: www.nybooks.com

• Many people in America throw the term "fascism" around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.

  David Foster Wallace

  America, People, Corporations

  Source: www.nybooks.com

• Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.

  David Foster Wallace

  Passports, Knows

  Source: www.electriccereal.com

• The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.

  David Foster Wallace

  Thinking, Way, Linear

  David Foster Wallace (2012). “David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations”, p.37, Melville House

• I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fun, Thinking, Littles

  Source: www.slate.com