"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 at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed."

Identity, Success, Fame, Paradox

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"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 at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed."

Exlpore more Identity quotes

"She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog."

Stephen King, American Author

Identity, Truth, Emotion, Wisdom, Power

"Who would you impress if the world was blind?"

Shannon L. Alder, American Author

Identity, Truth, Life, Wisdom

"Call me Richard. That's my real name. Call me that."

Stephen King, American Author

Identity, Truth, Today, Power

"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

David Levithan, American Author

Identity, Connection, Desire, Defiance

"Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that."

David Levithan, American Author

Identity, Love, Complexity, Sexuality

"She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Appearance, Age, Perception, Time

"But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Freedom, Snobbery, Detachment

"The fact is no one has understood me in entirety till now!"

Ramana Pemmaraju, Indian Physician

Identity, Understanding, Isolation, Self

"But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Identity, Absence, Memory, Mind

"We go to Europe to be Americanized."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

Identity, Europe, Travel, Culture

Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness."

Society

"I 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."

Art

"It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell."

Depression

"You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain."

Empathy

"Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move."

Madness

"I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy."

Film

"And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. ... But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from."

Criticism

"Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it."

Struggle

"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."

Art

"You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage."

Awareness