top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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 avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
Author Name
Personal Development
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace
"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
Art
"For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going."
Cause
"One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."
Philosophy
"I 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."
Desire
"The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."
Society
"She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it."
Emotion
"But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. . . How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?"
Wisdom
"What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration."
Creativity
"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: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone."
Art
"The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all."
Focus
bottom of page