Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Do exactly as you please–if you still trust what seems to please you.”

— David Foster Wallace

302. “You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.”

— David Foster Wallace

303. “This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.”

— David Foster Wallace

304. “It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.”

— David Foster Wallace

305. “The next year had seen them drop into the crazy-obsessive love spiral in which they’d break up and then not be able to stay away from each other, until one time she was able to stay away, and that was all she wrote.”

— David Foster Wallace

306. “Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.”

— David Foster Wallace

307. “I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”

— David Foster Wallace

308. “I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I’d come to see as my co-conspirator.”

— David Foster Wallace

309. “I acknowledge that I could never convey just what was so dreadful about this tableau of a bright, utterly silent room full of men immersed in work. It was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your chest and stomach about what you’re seeing.”

— David Foster Wallace

310. “Like the doctrine of determinism, its better-known metaphysical cousin, fatalism holds that it is not in our power to do anything other than what we actually end up doing.”

— David Foster Wallace

311. “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.”

— David Foster Wallace

312. “The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?”

— David Foster Wallace

313. “Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he’s quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”

— David Foster Wallace

314. “The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush.”

— David Foster Wallace

315. “I Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite if school, not because of it – which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.”

— David Foster Wallace

316. “For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.”

— David Foster Wallace

317. “When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.”

— David Foster Wallace

318. “Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool – it’s the same beast.”

— David Foster Wallace

319. “People who’re somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise.”

— David Foster Wallace

320. “Also essential to math is the sense in which abstracting something can mean reducing it to its absolute skeletal essence, as in the abstract of an article or book. As such, it can mean thinking hard about things that for the most part people can’t think hard about-because it drives them crazy.”

— David Foster Wallace

321. “Certain things not only can’t be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught.”

— David Foster Wallace

322. “Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.”

— David Foster Wallace

323. “Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her, his swollen eyes red and his face sagging so that its slack folds maybe touched, limply, the folds of her own loose sagging face as it sloshed back and forth on his pillow, its mouth working dryly. The thought was repellent.”

— David Foster Wallace

324. “My father’s mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.”

— David Foster Wallace

325. “Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.”

— David Foster Wallace

326. “People, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.”

— David Foster Wallace

327. “Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs?”

— David Foster Wallace

328. “The only way you can communicate at a high level is to be conscious of everything you write – every comma, every pronoun, every word, and all their implications.”

— David Foster Wallace

329. “I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.”

— David Foster Wallace

330. “Look for a candidate who can do to the electorate what corporations are learning to do, so Government – or, better, Big Government, Big Brother, Intrusive Government – becomes the image against which this candidate defines himself. Though.”

— David Foster Wallace

331. “My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so tired.”

— David Foster Wallace

332. “The Great White Male is rap’s Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy.”

— David Foster Wallace

333. “In life, the microphone passes your lips but once... you had better be ready to sing.”

— David Foster Wallace

334. “That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example ‘where they were’ when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.”

— David Foster Wallace

335. “And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.”

— David Foster Wallace

336. “I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.”

— David Foster Wallace

337. “Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...”

— David Foster Wallace

338. “There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a hair-raising case of Volkmann’s contracture 115 curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S’s and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and.”

— David Foster Wallace

339. “The father of Ruth van Cleve’s child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.”

— David Foster Wallace

340. “I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be an inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I’ll make the journey first, then depart.”

— David Foster Wallace

341. “I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams’ form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares’ very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been... overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you’ve overlooked and turning your head to look back at what’s been right there all along, the whole time...”

— David Foster Wallace

342. “Kafka’s evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.”

— David Foster Wallace

343. “To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.”

— David Foster Wallace

344. “Certe cose non solo non possono essere insegnate, ma possono essere ritardate da altre cose che invece possono essere insegnate.”

— David Foster Wallace

345. “It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict.”

— David Foster Wallace

346. “Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.”

— David Foster Wallace

347. “Well it totally freaks them out, what do you think? And I just about die of the embarrassment. I don’t ever know what to say. What do you say if you just shouted “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” right when you came?”

— David Foster Wallace

348. “There are secrets within secrets, though – always.”

— David Foster Wallace

349. “In short, not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words ‘Have a nice day’ while her expression indicates that it’s really a matter of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now.”

— David Foster Wallace

350. “You’d be doing us both a favor.’ ‘This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.’ Orin and Hal’s term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It’s like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her.”

— David Foster Wallace