904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

We’re a family that takes its home entertainment very seriously.

I think it’s easy to stop smoking; it’s just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange – of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.

Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients’ own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus.

People turned out so identical in certain root domestic particulars it made Gately feel strange sometimes, like he was in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which no man should be entitled.

Do exactly as you please–if you still trust what seems to please you.

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.

The next year had seen them drop into the crazy-obsessive love spiral in which they’d break up and then not be able to stay away from each other, until one time she was able to stay away, and that was all she wrote.

The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.