True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and careโwith no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
David Foster WallaceI 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 WallaceI often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
David Foster WallaceSuch techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers.
David Foster WallaceThe lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
David Foster Wallace