David Foster Wallace

"The so-called 'present moment' of real time is really just an imagined collective narcosis."

"We're all lonely for something we're not sure we are."

"The so-called 'real world' will not discourage you from operating on asinine principles by which you can feel good in the moment."

"Lonely people tend, rather, to reject everybody, beginning with themselves."

"Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it."

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people."

"The so-called 'postmodern' age is still an age."

"I am in fact a Marxist, but of the Groucho variety."

"Pleasure becomes a value, a teleology, an odyssey, a star to steer by."

"The so-called 'infinite regress' problem just keeps going deeper and deeper."

"There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of the vote of someone who does."

"The hard part about being an artist is that you have to believe in yourself when no one else does."

"Constant, unceasing warfare with yourself tends to produce a weird kind of self-intimacy."

"The so-called 'real me' is not a particularly deep or complicated thing."

"We are dying creatures who in some sense are being pressed down upon by gravity and mortality every single instant."

"You can either type or you can't. There is no middle ground."

"The so-called 'beautiful' things are often the most destructive."

"This is water."

"The so-called 'meaning of life' is actually quite banal."

"Loneliness is not living alone. Loneliness is the feeling that nobody understands you."

"The so-called 'paradox' of contemporary life is that we're more connected yet more isolated."

"Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

"The so-called 'good life' is usually just the avoidance of serious suffering."

"Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it can enable you to operate with great confidence outside your actual area of competence."

"I do things like get in a taxi and say, the library, and somehow the driver knows that I mean the British Library."

"The so-called 'self' is really just a grammatical convenience."

"There is no difference between a tree and a person except complexity."

"The so-called 'present' is really just the gap between past and future."

"Talent is its own expectation: you don't choose it, it chooses you."

"The so-called 'real world' is often less real than the world of ideas."