He [Wallace] sent a quick note to his friend [Franzen] explaining his behavior. “the bold fact is that I’m a little afraid of you right now,”[…] “all I can tell you is that I may...

When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author’s getting an award he though should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: “Mostly I try to remember...

David Foster Wallace: Because 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.

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that...

According to Wallace, the expectation that art amuses is a ‘poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with,’ since it places all of the power with the audience, sometimes breeding resentment on the...

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness,...

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it,...

Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think that that’s—that that’s it. That that’s the point, that that’s the goal, you...

Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole...

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? The true...

In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He’s found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged...

I think it’s easy to stop smoking; it’s just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.