110+ David Foster Wallace Quotes On Writing, Depression And Insightful

David Foster Wallace was an American writer and professor of English and creative writing. He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time magazine cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. He was also a contributor to several major publications, including Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. Following is our collection on famous quotes by David Foster Wallace on love, writing, life.

Top 10 David Foster Wallace Quotes

1. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
2. It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
3. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
4. If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.
5. This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
6. I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
7. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
8. How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
9. Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
10. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

David Foster Wallace Image Quotes

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Short Quotes

• The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
• Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
• It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
• Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
• Good literature makes your head throb heartlike
• It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
• The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
• Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.
• Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
• Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

David Foster Wallace Quotes About Love

I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back. — David Foster Wallace

Every love story is a ghost story. — David Foster Wallace

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. — David Foster Wallace

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. — David Foster Wallace

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it. — David Foster Wallace

It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again. — David Foster Wallace

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto. — David Foster Wallace

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 Foster Wallace

What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love? — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes About Writing

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. — David Foster Wallace

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. — David Foster Wallace

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good. — David Foster Wallace

In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it. — David Foster Wallace

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better. — David Foster Wallace

The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about." — David Foster Wallace

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. — David Foster Wallace

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories. — David Foster Wallace

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal. — David Foster Wallace

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes About Life

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking? — David Foster Wallace

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. — David Foster Wallace

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. — David Foster Wallace

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not. — 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. — David Foster Wallace

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without. — David Foster Wallace

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. — David Foster Wallace

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. — David Foster Wallace

The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning. — David Foster Wallace

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes About Reader

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. — David Foster Wallace

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush. — David Foster Wallace

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. — David Foster Wallace

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages. — David Foster Wallace

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes About People

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. — David Foster Wallace

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. — David Foster Wallace

Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same. — David Foster Wallace

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. — David Foster Wallace

Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own. — David Foster Wallace

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. — David Foster Wallace

...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. — David Foster Wallace

I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes. — 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. — David Foster Wallace

It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes About Kind

The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon. — David Foster Wallace

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. — David Foster Wallace

she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm. — David Foster Wallace

What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic. — David Foster Wallace

I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I. — David Foster Wallace

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity — David Foster Wallace

I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read. — David Foster Wallace

There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. — David Foster Wallace

There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is. — David Foster Wallace

America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes About Fact

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. — David Foster Wallace

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be. — David Foster Wallace

We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us? — David Foster Wallace

Many people in America throw the term "fascism" around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state. — David Foster Wallace

In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes About Idea

If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be. — David Foster Wallace

I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas. — David Foster Wallace

He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Famous Quotes And Sayings

I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it. — David Foster Wallace

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. — David Foster Wallace

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. — David Foster Wallace

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear. — David Foster Wallace

Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real. — David Foster Wallace

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings. — David Foster Wallace

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. — David Foster Wallace

....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you. — David Foster Wallace

Two young salmon are swimming along one day. As they do, they are passed by a wiser, older fish coming the other way. The wiser fish greets the two as he passes, saying, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The other two continue to swim in silence for a little while, until the first one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?" — David Foster Wallace

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. — David Foster Wallace

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. — David Foster Wallace

For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. — David Foster Wallace

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog. — David Foster Wallace

I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship's Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet...I now know the precise mixocological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a fuzzy navel. — David Foster Wallace

Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier"). — David Foster Wallace

For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going. — David Foster Wallace

He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot. — David Foster Wallace

You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. — David Foster Wallace

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

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. — David Foster Wallace

Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? — David Foster Wallace

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

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase. — David Foster Wallace

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive. — David Foster Wallace

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic? — David Foster Wallace

I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator. — David Foster Wallace

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. — David Foster Wallace

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility. — David Foster Wallace

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. — David Foster Wallace

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. — David Foster Wallace

For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port. — David Foster Wallace

Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they're going to get a C in my class, and so my classes tend to have like four students in them. It's really a lot of fun. — David Foster Wallace

Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. — David Foster Wallace

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic. — David Foster Wallace

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. — David Foster Wallace

It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me? — David Foster Wallace

Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos. — David Foster Wallace

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him. — David Foster Wallace

If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. — David Foster Wallace

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people. — David Foster Wallace

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. — David Foster Wallace

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop. — David Foster Wallace

The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. — David Foster Wallace

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ — David Foster Wallace

TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison. — David Foster Wallace

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. — David Foster Wallace

All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. — David Foster Wallace

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still. — David Foster Wallace

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being. — David Foster Wallace

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

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. — David Foster Wallace

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. — David Foster Wallace

John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived-the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad. — David Foster Wallace

There are very few innocent sentences in writing. — David Foster Wallace

So yo then man what's your story? — David Foster Wallace

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today. — David Foster Wallace

Life Lessons by David Foster Wallace

1. David Foster Wallace taught us to be mindful of our lives and to appreciate the little things. He also encouraged us to be open to new ideas and to challenge our own beliefs. Lastly, he showed us that it is important to be kind and understanding to those around us, even when it is difficult.