I read Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself – A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky (see yesterday’s blog post) conscious that I was on the lookout for quotable lines.
I was eager to find clues as to what it felt like to be David Foster Wallace.
Here are some I highlighted:
- “Sitting alone with a piece of paper is what’s real to me”.
- “If a writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is”.
- “The harder it is to make a reader feel like it’s worthwhile to read your stuff, the better a chance you’ve got of making real art”.
- “The main job of entertainment is to separate you from your cash somehow”.
- “Why are we – and by ‘we’ I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy – why do we feel empty and unhappy?”
- “I think one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people”.
- “I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then”.
- “I don’t think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity or in their confusion”.
- “When I’m in a room alone, and have enough time. I can be really smart”.
- “If you write stuff that’s intimate and weird, weird people tend to feel they’re intimate with you”.
- “Maybe I’m a minimalist, in a perverse way”.
From the age of 17 onwards I have been fascinated by Franz Kafka’s world – both in his fiction and his life as an insurance clerk in Prague. When I first read his novels and short stories I was a frustrated clerk myself, working for the Inland Revenue in London and imagining myself as a struggling writer in my free time.
