"But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It'd never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn't yield results. It's hollow."

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More quotes from: David Foster Wallace

• "A certain amount of the form-conscious stuff I write is trying - with whatever success ..."
• "Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the ..."
• "After the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the ..."
• "All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV ..."
• "And since there's always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, ..."
• "At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click in ..."
• "Avoiding any reference to the pop would mean either being retrograde about what's "permissible" in ..."
• "Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my ..."
• "But at some point "minimalist" style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by ..."
• "But since your good opinion is the sole arbitrator of my success and worth, you ..."
• "But there's an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the ..."
• "But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their ..."
• "Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenuous because it was in the service of something. The math ..."
• "Even today, when people I don't know ask me what I do for a living, ..."
• "Fiction-writing's lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It's yourself you have to be estranged ..."
• "Fiction's about what it is to be a human being. "
• "For some reason I probably couldn't even explain, I've been convinced of this for years, ..."
• "For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be ..."
• "Here's a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see ..."
• "Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it ..."
• "I 've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting ..."
• "I don't know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, ..."
• "I don't seem to be able to call myself a writer. And terms like "postmodernist" ..."
• "I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what ..."
• "I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who ..."
• "I guess I don't know what to think about these explosions in the sixties you're ..."
• "I guess I'd judge what I do by the same criterion I apply to the ..."
• "I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to ..."
• "I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today ..."
• "I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this ..."
• "I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of ..."
• "I think it's impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of ..."
• "I think right now it's important for art-fiction to antagonize the reader's sense that what ..."
• "I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people ..."
• "I think younger writers owe themselves a richer account of just why TV's become such ..."
• "I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent ..."
• "I'm always stumped when critics regard references to popular culture in serious fiction as some ..."
• "I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because the big R's ..."
• "I'm not saying I'm able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems ..."
• "Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense. "
• "If a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, ..."
• "If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and ..."
• "If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can ..."
• "If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things ..."
• "In a mass mediated nation, it's no longer North vs. South. It's under-thirty vs. over ..."
• "In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's ..."
• "In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates ..."
• "In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that's causing you ..."
• "Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called ..."
• "Irony's useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now ..."
• "Is it essentially mimetic, to capture and order a protean reality? Or is it really ..."
• "Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling ..."
• "It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire ..."
• "It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. ..."
• "It might also be a part of why I end up doing anywhere from five ..."
• "It might just be that simple. "
• "It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and ..."

• "It seems to involve the idea that if writers care enough about their audience - ..."
• "It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called "the click of a ..."
• "It was standing in line to happen. And for a while, stuff like "Pale Fire" ..."
• "It's a grim world, exhausted and empty and full of mute, beaten people, but the ..."
• "It's a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now ..."
• "It's almost always deployed to make some point or to create an effect that's internal ..."
• "It's easy for older writers just to bitch about TV's hegemony over the U.S. art ..."
• "It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of ..."
• "It's literally aggravating: you awaken them to the fact that they've been unconsciously imbibing some ..."
• "It's often useful to dispense with standard formulas, of course, but it's just as often ..."
• "It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound. "
• "It's the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel ..."
• "It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I ..."
• "Look at utilitarianism - that most English of contributions to ethics- and you see a ..."
• "Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ..."
• "Maybe our touchstone now should be G. M. Hopkins, who made up his "own" set ..."
• "Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon. Art's reflection on itself is terminal, is one ..."
• "Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any ..."
• "Minimalism's just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem's still the one of ..."
• "My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore's poetry or like DeLillo's ..."
• "No question that some of the early postmodernists and ironists and anarchists and absurdists did ..."
• "Now the rap response is more like "You've always exploited us to get rich, so ..."
• "Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. "
• "Observing a quantum phenomenon's been proven to alter the phenomenon. Fiction likes to ignore this ..."
• "On the one hand, there's sort of an embarrassment of riches for young writers now. ..."
• "Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady's bunk and Just ..."
• "Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes ..."
• "One new context is to take something almost narcotizingly banal- it's hard to think of ..."
• "One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he ..."
• "One teacher called these moments "mathematical experiences." What I didn't know then was that a ..."
• "One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we ..."
• "People have been under some sort of metaphysical anesthesia, so you dismantle the metaphysics' axioms ..."
• "People who've been raised with U.S. commercial culture and are engaged with it and informed ..."
• "Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. ..."
• "Postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just ..."
• "Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous ..."
• "Raymond Carver invented - or resurrected, if you want to cite Hemingway - the techniques ..."
• "Raymond Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he's supposedly the inventor of ..."
• "Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find ..."
• "Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text. "
• "Return with us now to Deare Olde Amherst. For most of my college career I ..."
• "Rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set ..."
• "Showing the reader that you're smart or funny or talented or whatever, trying to be ..."
• "Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we ..."
• "So it's hard for an art audience, especially a young one that's been raised to ..."
• "Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every ..."
• "Sure "A Clockwork Orange" is a self-consciously sick, nasty film about the sickness and nastiness ..."
• "Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They're like ..."
• "The "pretension." Twenty-five year-olds should be locked away and denied ink and paper. Everything I ..."
• "The analogy breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They're like building a ..."
• "The classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops right into spectation. It ..."
• "The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and ..."
• "The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" and in parts ..."
• "The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them ..."
• "The idea of being a "writer" repelled me, mostly because of all the foppish aesthetes ..."
• "The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. "

• "The last couple years have been pretty arid for me good-work-wise, but the one way ..."
• "The mass media unified the country geographically for pretty much the first time. Rock helped ..."
• "The modernists and early postmodernists - all the way from Mallarme to Coover, I guess ..."
• "The only stuff a writer can get from an artistic ancestor is a certain set ..."
• "The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. ..."
• "The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise ..."
• "The popularity of "Broom" mystifies me. I can't say it's not nice to have people ..."
• "The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of ..."
• "The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant ..."
• "The question of where do "artists" get off deciding for readers what stuff the readers ..."
• "The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so ..."
• "The result often seems "unrealistic" to the big-R devotees because it's not a recognizable part ..."
• "The scrambled, flash-cut form I ended up using for the novella was probably unsubtle and ..."
• "The stuff in "Broom" that's informed by that sense of play ended up pretty forgettable, ..."
• "The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism ..."
• "There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what's happened since post-structural theory took ..."
• "There's many different ways to think about what I'm doing, but if I follow what ..."
• "There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of ..."
• "There's something about free play within an ordered and disciplined structure that resonates for readers. ..."
• "These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution to ..."
• "This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. "
• "This eliminated solipsism, but not the horror. Because we're still stuck. The "Investigation" 's line ..."
• "This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. "
• "This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship ..."
• "This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers ..."
• "This thing doesn't have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent like Leyner's ..."
• "This was Wittgenstein's double bind: you can either treat language as an infinitely small dense ..."
• "To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even ..."
• "Today you've got black rappers who make their reputation rapping about Kill the White Corporate ..."
• "TV-type art's biggest hook is that it's figured out ways to "reward" passive spectation. "
• "TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll ..."
• "Very few people I talk to understand what "generation gap" 's implications really were. Kids ..."
• "We all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on ..."
• "We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. "
• "We seem to be in an era when oppression and exploitation no longer bring a ..."
• "We still think in terms of a story "changing" the reader's emotions, cerebrations, maybe even ..."
• "We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about ..."
• "We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. ..."
• "We've all got this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we're all becoming less and ..."
• "We've seen that you can break any or all of the rules without getting laughed ..."
• "Well, it's too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV's ruined readers. Because ..."
• "What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" ..."
• "What's engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely ..."
• "What's especially dangerous about Carver's techniques is that they seem so easy to imitate. It ..."
• "What's precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there's a great deal ..."
• "When you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you're talking about real geniuses, the writers who ..."
• "Whether I can provide a payoff and communicate a function rather than just seem jumbled ..."
• "Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer ..."
• "With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. "
• "Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function ..."
• "You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, ..."
• "You could argue that it affects only "her reaction to the story" or "her take ..."
• "You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. ..."
• "You've got music here that both hates the white GOP values of the Reaganiod eighties ..."
• "You've got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It's become our language; ..."
• "Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals, whatever. These are the people pretty much all the ..."