"Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero."

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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 what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show ..."
• "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 ..."
• "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 ..."