David Foster Wallace Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

  David Foster Wallace

  Loneliness, Writing, Thinking

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

  David Foster Wallace

  Art, Writing, Get Better

• 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

  Writing, Fiction, Way

• 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.

  David Foster Wallace

  Reading, Writing, Hard Times

• Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.

  David Foster Wallace

  Strong, Real, Loneliness

• There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Innocent, Sentences

• 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.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  Translation of the Zeit Online interview, www.thehowlingfantods.com. January 26, 2007.

• Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fun, Writing, Fiction

  David Foster Wallace (2012). “Both Flesh And Not”, p.129, Penguin UK

• Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Would Be, Fiction

• 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

  Real, Writing, Love Is

• 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

  Writing, Vanity, Fiction

  David Foster Wallace (2014). “The David Foster Wallace Reader”, Hachette UK

• We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

  David Foster Wallace

  Art, Writing, Use

• 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.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Artist, Years

• One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

  David Foster Wallace

  Book, Writing, Paradox

• No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Stories, Fifty

• God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Want, Way

• When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Trying, Juggernaut

• I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Eight, Worry

• 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

  Fun, Reading, Writing

• The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Wall, Book

• Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

  David Foster Wallace

  Art, Stupid, Real

• Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Fiction, Down And

• A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Airplane, Novelists

• Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Writing, Artist

• If you're writing fiction, you're dealing with characters who, themselves, will have heartfelt sentiments but who, themselves, live in this culture right now and thus face all the impediments to sort of dealing with those parts of their lives that, you know, that we did. So it would be not only silly but unrealistic to have a character saying that kind of stuff.

  David Foster Wallace

  Silly, Writing, Character

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

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