A lot of women in magazines are pretty in a way that is not erotic...because they don't look like anybody that you know. You can't imagine them putting a quarter in a parking meter...or, like, eating a bologna sandwich. Whereas, Alanis Morissette, I can and have imagined her just, like, chowing down on a bologna sandwich. I find her absolutely riveting.
We are both so young. He wants something better than he has. I want precisely what he has already. Neither of us knows where our lives are going to go. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda and smoke.
Wallace offered his alive self, cutting through our sleepy aquarium, our standard TV, stores, political campaigns. Writers who can do this-- like Salinger and Fitzgerald forge an unbreakable bond with readers. You didn't slip into the books looking for a story, information, but for a particular experience the sensation, for a certain number of pages, of being David Foster Wallace." If anything, there was a conscious attempt...to not give overt direction, although, of course, you end up becoming yourself.
I'm gonna have to leave the planet. 'Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier...and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable...to sit alone with images on a screen...given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that's fine in low doses, but if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.
I don't even know if I would watch it all the time, but it would be on all the time. My version of a fireplace--some sort of source of warmth and light...in the corner, I'd occasionally get sucked into.
I think if you dedicate yourself to anything, one facet of that is that it makes you very, very self-conscious. And you end up using people--wanting them around when you want them around...and then sending them away.
- I got a question. Why aren't you married, at 30?
- Why aren't you married, at 34?
- I just think it's hard to cast that role, you know, to fill it when you know it's gonna be like 30 to 40 years. To find someone who, whatever mental landscape you're in, they're gonna be in it too. You have to find someone who will fit any landscape you can imagine.
- I can't put it as well as you can, you know, about these mental landscapes.I just I know that I'm hard to be around.
- What are you doing here? I mean, why are you not in New York?
- Every time I go to New York, I get caught up in this--There's this enormous hiss of egos at various states of inflation and deflation.
