Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around. David Foster Wallace More Quotes by David Foster Wallace More Quotes From David Foster Wallace This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. David Foster Wallace engagement done two The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush. David Foster Wallace hush eye purpose The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be. David Foster Wallace stills half facts I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you 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." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. David Foster Wallace believe interesting thinking I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me. David Foster Wallace notebook figures trying You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. David Foster Wallace scared persons thinking Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me. David Foster Wallace real stupid art In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. David Foster Wallace cpr dark art Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection. David Foster Wallace real math believe 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 manhattan blame tvs So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? David Foster Wallace hard silence lying Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense. David Foster Wallace evaluation unique art There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free. David Foster Wallace hazards being-free choices Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer. David Foster Wallace dope kissing meaningful Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal. David Foster Wallace suicide spiritual book 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 terrified people thinking 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 young-writers desire thinking The real irony is that the view of infinity as some forbidden zone or road to insanity - which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years - is precisely what Cantor's own work overturned. Saying that infinity drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George's loss to the dragon: it's not only wrong but insulting. David Foster Wallace powerful real math 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 order looks moving For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port. David Foster Wallace bovine stronger travel
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