Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.”

— David Foster Wallace

102. “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

103. “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

104. “If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.”

— David Foster Wallace

105. “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

106. “That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.”

— David Foster Wallace

107. “That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.”

— David Foster Wallace

108. “Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. By the time these people swallow entire medicine cabinets or take naps in the garage or whatever, they’ve already been killing themselves for ever so long. When they ‘commit suicide’, they’re just being orderly.”

— David Foster Wallace

109. “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

110. “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

111. “The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.”

— David Foster Wallace

112. “They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.”

— David Foster Wallace

113. “If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying.”

— David Foster Wallace

114. “I think it’s easy to stop smoking; it’s just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.”

— David Foster Wallace

115. “It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.”

— David Foster Wallace

116. “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

117. “It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”

— David Foster Wallace

118. “For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port.”

— David Foster Wallace

119. “It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.”

— David Foster Wallace

120. “Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they’ll get in touch with you.”

— David Foster Wallace

121. “At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.”

— David Foster Wallace

122. “There’s a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.”

— David Foster Wallace

123. “A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own.”

— David Foster Wallace

124. “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

125. “That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.”

— David Foster Wallace

126. “I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.”

— David Foster Wallace

127. “Authors are monkeys who mean.”

— David Foster Wallace

128. “Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they’re naive.”

— David Foster Wallace

129. “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

130. “It’s probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.”

— David Foster Wallace

131. “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

132. “We need an inflation-generative grammar.”

— David Foster Wallace

133. “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

134. “Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.”

— David Foster Wallace

135. “You are the sort of auditor for whom the rhetoricians designed the exordium.”

— David Foster Wallace

136. “Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.”

— David Foster Wallace

137. “Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

— David Foster Wallace

138. “Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing.”

— David Foster Wallace

139. “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

140. “It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.”

— David Foster Wallace

141. “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. Let’s talk about anything. I.”

— David Foster Wallace

142. “If two people get married in West Virginia and then pull up stakes and move to Massachusetts and then if they decide they want to get a divorce, what’s the biggest problem getting a divorce?”

— David Foster Wallace

143. “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

— David Foster Wallace

144. “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

145. “Capital T-truth is about life before death.”

— David Foster Wallace

146. “The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

— David Foster Wallace

147. “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.”

— David Foster Wallace

148. “And then but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?”

— David Foster Wallace

149. “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”

— David Foster Wallace

150. “The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.”

— David Foster Wallace