David Foster Wallace Quotes

To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish

I've never been someone who's very prone to boredom. I don't know, boredom seems like something you should grow out of at about 15 or 16. There's so much that needs to be done.

My brain is a big cluster of stuff. It moves quickly and loses focus quickly, so I need many projects to keep me stimulated - it's a luxury to be able to do lots of different things: style, write, present, DJ or just consult. It can't be any other way; I think I would shrivel up and fall asleep forever.

Having my brain doing different work is helping me a lot in terms of retro-feeding from the other experiences. It makes me feel inspired, looking forward to the projects and wanting to work harder.

When you drink coffee, you become very focused, and in fact, the key to creative genius is to be defocused.

It's mental discipline that sets one apart, the ability to think differently and to generate energy in the right direction.

Psychologists call it "defocused attention," where you broaden your horizons, let your mind float and drift a bit. Coffee keeps us sharp and alert. It's great if you're driving at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's not so great if you're trying to come up with the next violin concerto.

I have to use all these programs that cut off the internet, force me to be bored, because being bored is an essential part of writing, and the internet has made it very hard to be bored.

My brain has a weird way of turning pressure into other things. I make a point to myself of shrugging it off - of going the other way and doing something for myself, wanting to do something better. For example, I know that I could have made 'Lonerism 2.0' in a day, but it wouldn't have satisfied me.

Work hard, take it seriously, embrace your ambition. And when you're not doing that, do something - whatever it happens to be - that taps into the part of you that makes you forget about all the rest of it.

I never don't have a good time. Even when I go to work with a cold or a sore throat, as soon as I hit the mark and walk out that door, everything else is gone, and I'm up.

I am so thirsty to do my projects whenever I have a spare moment.

I believe productivity is a deeply personal thing. We all have different brains and, therefore, different preferences, perspectives, and situations where we feel most effective.

When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns.

In running my own company, I was too busy for a while, and I thought, 'Maybe I'll stop dancing for a bit.' It was the worst decision ever. I just lost my creativity and my drive.

And I'm autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I'm very lucky to have found cooking because it's the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.

I just said, 'I need to do something because staying up and watching YouTube and late night TV is not cool,' so I just decided to write a script.

When I'm not worrying about what other people want, that's when I do the best work.

In a way, I'm overly ambitious, selfish in a way. I think because I am so active, I think that's what keeps my brain going and I can bounce things off of each other.

I never really feel overwhelmed; I feel energized by what goes on in our day.

I'm the kind of person who needs to be challenged all the time. I need my brain to go, or else I just end up playing video games all day, you know? That's cool too, I guess, at times.

Getting the ideas are a struggle for me. I'm doing better now that I use the concentration tapes. More unusual ideas.

I have my own studio. I'm in it all the time.

People all the time try to take my outside interests and make them a negative. My life has always been like that and it always will be like that. I don't think it necessarily means that while I'm concentrating on tennis I can't put 100% into it. If I didn't have 100 different interests, I probably wouldn't be as good a player.

Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.