David Foster Wallace Quotes

Every ignoramus imagines that all that exists, exists with a view to his individual sake; it is as if there were nothing that exists except him. And if something happens to him that is contrary to what he wishes, he makes the trenchant judgement that all that exists is an evil.

We all get self-centered.

Nobody really cares about what other people think anymore; they're all about themselves.

His fundamental interest throughout his life was himself.

The only one that matters is me. I am the only one that matters.

It is really exhausting to live in a dictatorship of 'Me', which is basically a tyranny of others.

Just each of us being me, me, me first. The murderer, the victim, the witness each of us thinks our role is the lead. Probably that goes for anybody in the world.

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

I think; therefore, I am the center of the universe.

It's really rare for film directors to be that interested in things other than themselves.

Particularly with middle-class people, self-absorption is a struggle.

I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

You can't get too caught up in yourself.

I think players maybe now want to look more pretty than anything else. What I feel disappointed about when I watch games is too many players think of themselves. Still good players, maybe better than we were, but looking too much at themselves.

I don't focus on anyone but myself.

In men this blunder still you find; all think their little set mankind.

Selfishness is the making a man's self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.

Life's all about 'me' anyway

I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me!... I'm Me!... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get fought... ego... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game.

The idea of narcissism, essentially, is and will be accepted as a virtue.

There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?

In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.