Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Feeling Alone Quotes

2. “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Self-Worth Quotes, Focus On Yourself Quotes

3. “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

Featured in: Sacrifice Quotes

4. “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Truth Quotes

5. “You’ll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.”

— David Foster Wallace

6. “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

— David Foster Wallace

7. “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

— David Foster Wallace

8. “Every love story is a ghost story.”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

9. “Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.”

— David Foster Wallace

10. “Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.”

— David Foster Wallace

11. “Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”

— David Foster Wallace

12. “You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”

— David Foster Wallace

13. “I wish you way more than luck.”

— David Foster Wallace

14. “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

15. “No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”

— David Foster Wallace

16. “If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”

— David Foster Wallace

17. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

— David Foster Wallace

18. “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Loneliness Quotes

19. “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

— David Foster Wallace

20. “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.”

— David Foster Wallace

21. “Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

— David Foster Wallace

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

Featured in: Sadness Quotes

26. “Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.”

— David Foster Wallace

27. “Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”

— David Foster Wallace

28. “Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

— David Foster Wallace

29. “I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.”

— David Foster Wallace

30. “So yo then man what’s your story?”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

31. “We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Loneliness Quotes, Lonely Quotes

32. “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

— David Foster Wallace

33. “Mediocrity is contextual.”

— David Foster Wallace

34. “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

35. “It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.”

— David Foster Wallace

36. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

— David Foster Wallace

37. “Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.”

— David Foster Wallace

38. “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

39. “Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.”

— David Foster Wallace

40. “I don’t want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.”

— David Foster Wallace

41. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Fun Quotes

42. “But of course there are all kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.”

— David Foster Wallace

43. “My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.”

— David Foster Wallace

44. “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

45. “Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.”

— David Foster Wallace

46. “We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.”

— David Foster Wallace

47. “I am not what you see and hear. -Hal.”

— David Foster Wallace

48. “There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.”

— David Foster Wallace

49. “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

50. “Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.”

— David Foster Wallace