2015-02-17
I read it as a relief from what’s true. I read it as a relief from the fact that, I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those out […]David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-17
[…] the cognitive texture, of our lives changes. And as, um, as the different media by which our lives are represented change. And it’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along. And that’s what’s precious about it. And the reason why I’m angry at how shitty most of it is, and how much it ignores the reader, is that I think it’s very very very very precious. Because it’s the stuff that’s about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-17
[…] the history of fiction represents this continuing struggle to allow fiction to continue to do that magical stuff.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-21
I think we’re really setting ourselves up for repression and fascism. I think our hunger, our hunger to have somebody else tell us what to do—or for some sort of certainty, or something to steer by—is getting so bad, um, that I think it’s, there’s even a, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, I mean, makes a similar argument economically.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-17
What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. [James Brown: “I Feel Good” in background, on the restaurant sound system.] It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop … and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-21
[…] maybe at least for somebody who comes out of a more theoretical avant-garde tradition, I think the aging process is a thawing process […]David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-17
The technology’s gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependent on it, so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements. And as a technology system, it’s amoral.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-03-22
And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin’ over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate conversation between two consciences […]David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-17
And I think, I think there’s a reason why a lot of avant-garde stuff gets neglected: I think that a lot of it deserves to be. Same with a lot of poetry. That’s written for other people that write poetry, and not for people that read. I don’t know. That’s kind of a whole rant.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-03-22
The thing that I think a lot of us forget is, part of the fault of that is books. Is that probably as, you know — you get this sort of cycle, as they become less important commercially and in the mainstream, they’ve begun protecting their ego by talking more and more to each other. And establishing themselves as this tight kind of cloistered world that doesn’t really have anything to do, you know, with real regular readers.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-17
But I think that if avant-garde stuff can do its job, it is tremendously difficult and not that accessible, and seduces the reader into making extraordinary efforts that he wouldn’t normally make. And that that’s the kind of magic that really great art can do.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-21
One of the things about being a writer is you’re able to give the impression — both in the lines and between the lines — that you know an enormous amount. That you know and have lived intimately all this stuff. Because you want it to have that kind of effect on the nerve endings. And it’s like — it’s something that I’m fairly good at.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-17
Life seems to strobe on and off for me, and to barrage me with input. And that so much of my job is to impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense of it.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-23
But I had never as a young writer realized that you still had an obligation to make a kind of narrative. That really the goals of realism and the goals of surrealism are exactly the same. And they’re indescribable. But they’re two completely different highways that have the same destination. And I’d never snapped to that before.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace
2015-02-17
Because this idea that the Internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean, if you’ve spent any time on the Web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide.David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace