"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 s...
There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
~ David Foster Wallace ~
There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
More David Foster Wallace quotes
"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 a...
"No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
"For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.
"Q: What do you think is magical about fiction?DFW: ... The first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the ...
"If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.
"Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that ava...
"Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think that that’s—th...
"It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.
"Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Prog...
"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 l...
"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 o...
"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 f...
"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 way...
"That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of i...