Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.
David Foster WallaceHal 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 WallaceHow promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary. See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.
David Foster WallaceNot having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.
David Foster Wallace