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Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

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.

David Foster Wallace

Artist

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

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.

David Foster Wallace

Desire

Writers

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.

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

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

David Foster Wallace

Consequences

Weapons

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.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.

We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?

To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

David Foster Wallace

Talking

Writers

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.