Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself |

Sad to finish this, but truly great to access the inner workings of David Foster Wallace.  Below are my final highlighted excerpts from page 97 until the end of the book.  If you missed my first post of this book-length interview with David Lipsky, those excerpted highlights are available here.

pg. 97 “Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.”

pg. 104 PA: (as airplane is landing): “Just a reminder: The airport here in the Twin Cities is a smoke-free environment.  Smoking only is permitted outdoors.”

DFW:  “Permitted only outdoors. Its not the only thing that permitted outdoors.”

pg. 118 “The great thing about not owning a TV, is that, when you do have access to one, you can kind of plunge in.  An orgy of spectation.  Last night I watched the Golf Channel.  Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus.  Old footage, rigid haircuts.”

pg. 132 “The worst-case nightmare of this is that- is that though I don’t feel it yet, I truly, truly, enjoy it.  And I’m startin’ to turn into somebody who flies to New York every weekend for publication parties, shove my snout in front of other people’s photographs, and becomes this grotesque, capering figure.  I think my terror of that is sufficient to keep me from doing it.”

pg. 150 “I mean, this in a way is that the book’s about (Infinite Jest).  Its not about, “He watched television until his bladder let go,” or something like that- it’s more just, it’s a reliance on something.”

pg. 155 “I mean, there’s lots of times where I’ve read for three, four days in a row, pausing only to eat and sleep.”

pg. 156 “I began to see… a significant similarity between my relationship to television, and some of these people in the halfway house’s relation to, say, heroin.”

pg. 157 “So addiction is also a metaphor for how much you want readers to love a book.  To be hooked.  It’s an artist’s great ambition.”

pg. 158 “…you can’t find the middle until you hit both walls.”

pg. 162 “…what’s terribly pernicious about a lot of movies, is that they make the bad guys wholly unlike you.  They turn them into cartoons. That you can feel superior to.  Instead of making you realize that there’s a part of the villain in all of us.

pg. 166 “Don’t indulge your love for really cool special effects.  Make a story that like- that hangs together and treats the audience like grown-ups and means something.”

pg. 175 “…whatever the project of surrealism is works way better if 99.9 percent of it is absolutely real.”

pg. 180 “Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there’s nothing like- there’s no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older.  Who’s written something, or won some tournament, that you particularly admire.”

pg. 186-187 “Yeah, if I’m playin’ a little dumb I’m not, I’m not trying to condescend to you or act you you’re stupid.  It’s just I don’t, I don’t want to feel every edge of this quite yet… So I would be an idiot, you know, if I were not playing various psychic games and erecting defenses.”

pg. 191 “…to what extent have I been a willing accomplice in that invasion, you know?  To have written a book about how seductive image is, and how very many ways there are to get seduced off any kind of meaningful path, because of the way the culture is now.  But what if, you know, what if I become this grotesque parody of just what the book is about?”

pg. 196 “… I really need to find a few things that I believe in, in order to stay alive.  And one of them is that this is-that I’m extraordinarily lucky to be able to do this kind of work.  And that along with that luck come a tremendous obligation to do the best, to the the very best I can.”

pg. 198 “… there’s so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.”

pg. 201 “Loving somebody who’s absent, you know?  Their presence didn’t satisfy but you feel their absence so much more keenly.”

pg. 214 “…I think if you’re writing out of a place where you think that you’re smarter than everybody else, you’re either condescending to the reader, of talking down to ‘im, or playing games, or you think the point is to show how smart you are.”

pg. 237 on the movie City Slickers: “I didn’t even see that movie.  Jack Palance scares me.  I don’t see anything with Jack Palance.”

pg. 257 “You know, it may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided.  Right?  So that it’s a weird paradoxical link.  If you didn’t have the ambitions, you’d never find out that they were sort of deluded.”

pg. 270 on Infinite Jest:  “Probably one answer is that I wanted something that had kind of the texture of what mental life was like in America right now.”

pg. 273 “Who felt this way?  Who had, you know, worried that perhaps the reverse of paranoia was true: that nothing was connected to anything else.”

pg. 275 “I think with writing it’s really feeling that, their brain voice for a while becomes your brain voice.  And that you feel- the Vulcan Mind Meld perhaps is a better analogy.”

pg. 288-289 on books becoming passe: “For me the interesting question is, what’s caused books to become kind of less important parts of the cultural conversation? … I don’t think they’re passe.  I think they’ve gotta find fundamentally new ways to do their job.  And I don’t think for instance we as a generation have done a very good job of this.”

pg. 290 “I guess my first inclination would be to say that most of that would be- to create stuff that mirrors sort of neurologically the way the world feels.”

pg. 305 “… the more people think that you’re really good, um, actually the stronger the fear of being a fraud is. … If bad attention hurts you, then you realize that the caliber of the weapon that’s pointed at you has gone way up.  Has gone from like a .22 to a .45.”