top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Focus quotes
"Don't invest everything in another man's calling."
"You gotta make it a priority to make your priorities a priority."
"A busy life is not necessarily an effective life."
"There are so many things and people craving your attention such that you could so easily forget that you have a purpose to fulfill within a specified time on the earth."
"Through the years, I have heard that the average person speaks at about 150-160 words per minute, but can listen at a rate of about 1,000 words per minute. What is going on during all that extra mind time? Our minds are racing ahead and preparing for the next thing we are going to say. We are preoccupied with other thoughts, priorities, and distractions. Our subconscious filters are thumbing through our database of memories, judgments, experiences, perspectives, and opinions to frame how we are going to interpret what we think someone is saying."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient."
"A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane."
"The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits."
bottom of page