David Foster Wallace Quotes

“The people I know who are rebelling meaningfully, you know, don't buy a lot of stuff and don't get their view of the world from television and are willing to spend four, five hours researching an election rather than commercials. The thing about it is that in America, we think of rebellion as this very sexy thing and that it involves action and force and looks good. My guess is that any form of rebellion that will change things meaningfully here will be very quiet and very individual and probably not all that interesting to look at from the outside...Violence is interesting. Horrible corruption and scandals and rattling sabers and talking about war and demonizing a billion people of a different faith in the world—those are all interesting. Sitting in a chair and really thinking about what this all means and why the fact that what I drive might have something to do with how people in other parts of the world think about me isn't interesting to anybody else.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview Expanded with New Introduction: and Other Conversations

“There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“The problem is going to be, "Let's see, I spent all day staring at a computer screen and then at night my most meaningful relationships are with the two-dimensional characters who aren't in fact two-dimensional characters . . . Gee, I wonder why I'm lonely and doing a lot of drugs? Could there be any connection between the fact that I've got nothing to do with other people, that I don't really have a fucking clue what it is to have a real life, and the fact that most of my existence is mediated by entertainment that I passively choose to receive?”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. In fiction … we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“STIVERS: In Infinite Jest you didn't mention online services. Is there a reason for that?

WALLACE: To do a comprehensive picture of what the technology of that era would be like would take thirty-five hundred pages, number one. In the book, what I was most inrerested in was people's relation to filmed entertainment. There were other things, too. This is one of the ways that rhe cuts hurt. There was some more stuff that would have explained, for instance, the allusions to a virtual reality fad.

My guess is that what's going to happen is that these things are going to be real exciting for a while, but the sheer amount of information on them is going to be overwhelming. What is going to become particularly valuable are various nodes and filters and sites that help you lock in and specify sorts of things that you want. In the book, "Interlace TelEntertainment" has become one of those sites.

In the future, it is likely that concentrations of economic power are also going to be concentrations of informational power. For instance, in a way it'll be online; anybody who wants to is going to be fiction goes abie to publish a book on the net. The obvious problem, if you ve ever worked at a magazine or at a publisher, is that a lot of people write books but very few of them are any good. The person who is on the net, who has got maybe two hours to find something that's any good, will go to ner
t magazines that act as filters and exert some sort of editorial control, which of course will simply mean that online we have the same elitism.

What frustrates me is that people have this idea thar the internet and the web are going to be this tremendous democratizing force, that people can do anything they want. What they fail to understand is that people can't receive it all-their heads will bleed, right? So people are going to need help choosing. The places they go to for that help will have the power. They will decide; they will have the credibility. This is good since it isn't exactly the way it is in the publishing and informational world now but it isn't entirely different either.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“I keep coming back to this - we're not particularly religious, we tossed out religious authoritarianism as a base for our culture. That's good, but we haven't replaced it with anything except materialism.
We're living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly. Whatever else you can say about it, drug addiction is a form of religion, albeit a bent one. An addict gives himself away to his substance utterly. He trusts it, and his love for it is more important than his place in the community, his job, or his friends.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“Stories let us talk to one another about stuff that just can't be talked about any other way.

I'm pretty lonely most of the time, and fiction's one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted an relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase loneliness away by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. In lots of ways it's all there is.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“Streitfeld: Writing saved you!

Wallace: In a way it also killed me.”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“Civilwarland in Bad Decline”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“STREITFELD: "Scared" is a word that you often used to describe yourself.

WALLACE: Writers tend to be shy, bookish people. We're always on the fringes of the party, resenting the attention paid to others. And then finally when attention is paid to you, it is great and yet part of it sucks you liver out. Deep down it was the thing you always felt would make everything OK, and then you get it, and find everything isn't OK, and you're still scared.”
― David Foster Wallace , David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations