{"author":"David Foster Wallace","author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace","total_quotes":193,"quotes":[{"text":"You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... You kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... Imagine our absence. We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["children","existence","generations","parents"],"id":1017,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this 'both' shit. 'Both' comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. ... But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["david-lynch","film"],"id":2567,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"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.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["awareness","caring","discipline","freedom","love","people","sacrifice"],"id":4835,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["alone","aloneness","individual"],"id":6595,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"This story ['The Depressed Person'] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his 'Notes from Underground'. The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["depression","die-zeit-interview","narcissism"],"id":7878,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["mindset","perspective","purpose","tennis"],"id":9002,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["literature","writing"],"id":10921,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machines-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student's in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["literary-analysis","literature"],"id":12626,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["inspirational","readers","writers"],"id":13850,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"},{"text":"A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.","author":"David Foster Wallace","tags":["writing-life"],"id":14138,"author_id":"David+Foster+Wallace"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":193,"pages":20,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}