904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

My worst character flaw that I’m conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It’s paralyzing and boring for people around me.

This is how to play with personal integrity in a tournament’s early rounds, when there is no umpire. Any ball that lands on your side and is too close to call: call it fair. Here is how to be invulnerable to gamesmanship. To keep your attention’s aperture tight. Here is how to teach yourself, when an opponent maybe cheats on the line-calls, to remind yourself that what goes around comes around. That a poor sport’s punishment is always self-inflicted. Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

People, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race.

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

Basically what you’re doing when you’re writing fiction is telling a lie, he tells those of us in the seminar; and the psychology of reading dictates that we’re willing to buy only what coheres, on some gut level, with what we already believe.

It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never.