Top 26 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life 'outside' the story changes the story.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.