904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

Certe cose non solo non possono essere insegnate, ma possono essere ritardate da altre cose che invece possono essere insegnate.

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.

But it is not I the spy who have crept inside television’s boundaries. It is vice versa. Television, even the mundane little businesses of its production, has become my – our – own interior. And we seem a jaded, weary, but willing and above all knowledgeable Audience. And this knowledgeability utterly transforms the possibilities and hazards of “creativity” in television.

Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses – places where statements that seem to obey all the language’s rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.

David Cronenberg’s mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film.

That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example ‘where they were’ when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.

He considered getting up to check the color of the bong he’d be using but decided that obsessive checking and convulsive movements could compromise the atmosphere of casual calm he needed to maintain while he waited, protruding but not moving, for the woman he’d met at a design session for his agency’s small campaign for her small theater company’s new Wedekind festival, while he waited for this woman, with whom he’d had intercourse twice, to honor her casual promise.

I acknowledge that I could never convey just what was so dreadful about this tableau of a bright, utterly silent room full of men immersed in work. It was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your chest and stomach about what you’re seeing.