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.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
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.
The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.
It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
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.
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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.
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?
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.
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?
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.Collection: Life
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.Collection: Real
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.Collection: Inspirational
If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.Collection: Motivational
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.Collection: Mean
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.Collection: Keys
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.Collection: Bipolar
God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.Collection: Crazy
The man who knows his limitations, has none.Collection: Men
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do itCollection: Jobs
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.Collection: Struggle
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.Collection: Worship You
It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.Collection: Personal Courage
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?"Collection: Morning
If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers ... becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.Collection: Reading
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Worship You
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?Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Cheer
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.Collection: Understanding
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.Collection: Real
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.Collection: Inspirational