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 More Quotes by David Foster Wallace More Quotes From David Foster Wallace I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back. David Foster Wallace hate love-you way This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. David Foster Wallace cosmos worship men The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. David Foster Wallace being-lonely loneliness interesting 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 player beautiful sports One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime...he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's...what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty. David Foster Wallace athlete sports men a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful - what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives? - and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it... David Foster Wallace unique running meaningful 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 alarms pain fire Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. David Foster Wallace nuclear tvs weapons There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness. David Foster Wallace toxic psychics self Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. David Foster Wallace goal expression sports 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 agendas tvs real 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 weak worship feels In this country we're unprecedentedly safe, comfortable, and well fed, with more and better venues for stimulation. And yet if you were asked, 'Is this a happy or unhappy country?' you'd check the 'unhappy' box. We're living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly. David Foster Wallace drug emotional country I find in myself a need to get very away. David Foster Wallace needs 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. David Foster Wallace maps mind world The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do? David Foster Wallace diagnosis reality art You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff. David Foster Wallace party writing people 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 swimming morning boys The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. David Foster Wallace irony powerful impossible I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it. David Foster Wallace information important jobs
