David Foster Wallace Quotes

Linear thinking is patriarchal.

Every thing thinks, but according to its complexity. If this is so, then stones also think...and this stone thinks only I stone, I stone, I stone. But perhaps it cannot even say I. It thinks: Stone, stone, stone... God enjoys being All, as this stone enjoys being almost nothing, but since it knows no other way of being, it is pleased with its own way, eternally satisfied with itself.

Mum said, "It is the thought that counts." And I said, "I know, which is why I am ringing the authorities right now. Anyone who thinks like she does should be locked up out of harm's way.

Thinking is the capital, Enterprise is the way, Hard Work is the solution

. . . the fellow's got a bee in his bonnet. Thinks God's a secretion of the liver--all right once in a way, but there's no need to keep on about it. There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.

If companies don't know that they can run out of money, they won't be thinking of ways not to run out of money.

Happiness is something that you are, and it comes from the way you think.

I think there's a lot to be learned from pop culture. But at the same time I see the dangers of using it in an exclusive way to construct meaning in your life.

I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.

We all think that we are uniquely complex, that no one can see what we are thinking - yet we also believe that we have the rare ability to read others. This fascinates me at the moment.

The way you see your life shapes your life.

The only way you can be comfortable about Donald Trump's foreign policy, is to think he doesn't really mean anything he says.

If we think today the way TV is ordering us to think, we think of Einstein as someone modern. Stravinsky is modern music, but it came at the time of Birth of a Nation, which is an old movie.

The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.

Once you let yourself begin to be grown-up, you face a world full of problems you can't solve. The politicians and specialists - adults, all - have a hard enough time trying to figure out where to look. It doesn't have to be that way. The greatest solutions in society are reached by corporate thinking, ruled by a motive to either make a profit or go out of business.

Good, bad or indifferent, I'm transparent with my opinions and what I believe. I just don't think in politics you can be that way.

I think I'm always very naïve. With 'Kill Your Darlings' and 'Horns', I'm like, "Why wouldn't everybody love this?" But I guess it's going to divide people in some ways. But if you're willing to go with it and suspend your disbelief, you're going to get something amazing and something unlike anything else.

[Donald Trump] thinks in tiny little bursts - the way he tweets.

The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness . . . Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition.

If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist. . . . I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism.

I don't like the word 'career'. When somebody says to me, 'oh, you've had such a wonderful career', I think, 'career - that's after you're dead.' I just don't think that way.

Your reputation is what influences people to think, feel and talk about you the way they do.

Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there's no way to stop them. I'm out of control.