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 WallaceNot having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.
David Foster WallaceI submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).
David Foster Wallace