Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

by David Lipsky

“We live in the twilight of the old morality: there’s just enough to make us feel guilty, but not enough to hold us in.”

there’s no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older.

The trick—you know, if there’s one thing that the serious art can do, is that it can try to put you in places where you’re more alive to hearing that. You know? That it can seduce you into paying attention to stuff in a way that’s hard to pay attention to.

with. I don’t think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

Nabokov says same thing: you write a book to get rid of, do away with that part of yourself.

you’ve decided those delusions are empty, you’ve got a big problem, because like you said [three days ago, in airport], you can’t kill off parts of yourself. You have to start building machinery that can incorporate that part of yourself, but … that isn’t at its mercy, you know?