"There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.
~ David Foster Wallace ~
It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.
More David Foster Wallace quotes
"Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself f...
"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...
"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.
"I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginativ...
"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...
"Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself f...
"There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now...
"To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to s...
"Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Prog...