Literary Birthday - 21 February

Happy Birthday, David Foster Wallace, born 21 February 1962, died 12 September 2008

12 Quotes

1. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.
2. The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
3. 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.
4.  Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
5. We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?
6. I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.
7. The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info
8. Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
9. Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.
10. Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
11. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.
12. I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Wallace was an award-winning American novelist, and short story writer. He is best known as the author Infinite Jest which was named one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by Time magazine.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write