David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Explore the life, career, and enduring legacy of David Foster Wallace—one of America’s most influential writers. Delve into his biography, philosophy, and some of his most famous quotes.

Introduction

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) remains one of the most provocative, inventive, and emotionally resonant writers of his generation. As a novelist, essayist, and professor, he carved a path through the difficult terrain between intellect and vulnerability. His work—often densely footnoted, self-aware, and expansive in scope—grapples with addiction, modern culture, loneliness, and the search for meaning. Today, Wallace is revered not only for his literary ambition, but also for his deep concern over how we live day to day, how we perceive ourselves and others, and ultimately how we stay present in a mediated world.

Early Life and Family

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to Sally Jean Foster Wallace and James Donald Wallace.

Early on, his family moved to Champaign‐Urbana, Illinois, where Wallace spent much of his childhood.

As a teenager, Wallace became a regionally ranked junior tennis player—an experience he later used as material in his essays, especially in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” His early life combined intellectual stimulation with a competitive drive and introspective temperament.

Youth and Education

Wallace entered Amherst College where he studied English and Philosophy, graduating in 1985.

After Amherst, Wallace enrolled in the University of Arizona’s MFA program in creative writing. Harvard University, though he did not complete a PhD there.

Throughout these years, Wallace’s intellectual curiosity, facility with paradox, and emotional restlessness matured. He was drawn both to formal experimentation and to the messy realities of inner life.

Career and Achievements

Early literary work

Wallace’s debut novel, The Broom of the System, was published in 1987 and displayed early signs of his linguistic energy and formal daring. Girl with Curious Hair (1989), a collection of stories.

He began gaining recognition through essays, journalism, and shorter fiction. His essays often bridged the popular and the erudite, exploring culture, entertainment, language, and irony.

Infinite Jest and major works

Wallace’s magnum opus is Infinite Jest (1996), a sprawling, footnoted novel that blends satire, addiction, entertainment, tennis, and family dynamics—all set in a slightly futuristic North America. Time magazine named it one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

Post-Infinite Jest, Wallace published:

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997)

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)

• Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (2005)

Late in life he worked on The Pale King, a novel about bureaucracy, attention, and mundanity, which was published posthumously in 2011. The Pale King was even a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2012.

Academic & teaching

Wallace held teaching positions in creative writing and English at various institutions, including Pomona College (California). He deeply cared about students and the moral dimension of writing—how language shapes attention and life, not just art.

Historical Milestones & Context

Wallace’s literary life unfolded at the turn of the 21st century—a time of media saturation, technological acceleration, consumerism, and cultural fragmentation. He is often aligned with postmodern and post-postmodern trends, and some critics see his work as part of the New Sincerity movement: trying to reinject earnestness, emotional truth, and moral seriousness into a literary culture often cynical about such aims.

He also conversed with themes of addiction, mental health, public spectacle, irony, and the tension between individual interiority and external systems—topics especially resonant in a mediated, hyperconnected era.

His speech “This Is Water” (2005), delivered to Kenyon College graduates, became widely beloved and circulated, precisely because it distills many of his concerns about default consciousness, attention, empathy, and humility.

After his death, Wallace’s influence only deepened. His papers were acquired by the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. International David Foster Wallace Society and Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies have since been founded to continue critical engagement with his work.

Many contemporary writers cite Wallace’s mixture of ambition, empathy, formal risk, and moral concern as foundational to 21st-century literary sensibility.

Legacy and Influence

David Foster Wallace’s legacy is multifaceted:

• Literary influence: Writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Dave Eggers, and many others have acknowledged Wallace’s influence—particularly his capacity to fuse high complexity with emotional vulnerability.

• Critical scholarship: His works are subjects of deep academic inquiry, seminars, conferences, and continuing reinterpretation.

• Cultural resonance: Essays like “This Is Water” are often quoted or taught as meditations on how we live, attend, and choose attention daily.

• Archive & preservation: The acquisition of his personal archives ensures future generations can study drafts, letters, and manuscripts.

• Public fascination: The tragic arc of his life—his battles with depression and addiction, his early death by suicide—has galvanized both admiration and melancholy in readers, turning him into a kind of modern literary icon.

Personality and Talents

Wallace was paradoxical: wildly erudite and self-doubting, expansive in ambition and painfully introspective. He possessed a relentless curiosity—about language, systems, consciousness, and human experience. He could shift from high theory to a moment of quiet human tenderness or humor.

He struggled deeply with depression, addiction, and mental health challenges throughout his life. McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility, as part of detox and recovery. These personal struggles were not superficial to him—they informed his empathy, his sensitivity to suffering, and his insistence that intellectual rigor must never be divorced from moral regard.

Wallace had a deep love for dogs, especially ones that had been abused or neglected—he envisioned someday opening a dog shelter. His capacity for caring and his moral earnestness showed not despite his struggles, but because of the way he felt them.

Despite (or because of) his intellectual weight, Wallace was capable of wit, self-mockery, and levity. He resisted the notion of a detached writer, always trying to bring his whole self—including weaknesses—into writing.

Famous Quotes of David Foster Wallace

Here are several memorable quotes that resonate with Wallace’s worldview, writing philosophy, and moral reflections:

1. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people … in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

2. “This is not a matter of virtue — it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered.”

3. “You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.”

4. “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

5. “Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

6. “You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail.”

7. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

8. “There are these two young fish … one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’ This is the freedom of real education.”

9. “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

These quotations encapsulate recurring themes in his writing: the struggle of attention, the danger of living unconsciously, the necessity of empathy, and the paradox of inner life being conveyed through language.

Lessons from David Foster Wallace

• Attention is moral: One of Wallace’s deepest convictions was that how we attend—to what we see, whom we listen to—is a moral practice. In a world saturated with distractions, choosing what to see is itself an act of character.

• Complexity doesn’t preclude sincerity: Wallace pushed back against ironic detachment. He believed that literature (and life) must handle complexity, contradiction, and emotional risk without defaulting to cynicism.

• Vulnerability is strength: His willingness to reveal fragility, mental pain, doubt, and failure widened the emotional ground of his work. He showed that vulnerability can deepen—not weaken—our understanding of human experience.

• The mundane demands respect: He often focused not only on grand crises but on the quotidian—the grocery line, the commute, the inner dialogue. He believed that real life is not only dramatic moments but the small, daily choices.

• Meaning is active, not given: Wallace resisted the notion that meaning is auto-given. His work suggests that we must make meaning—sometimes by refusing default settings, by reorienting attention, by choosing what we worship.

Conclusion

David Foster Wallace was more than a “writer’s writer” or a cult figure. He embodied a dual impulse: to expand the formal possibilities of fiction and essay, and to bring readers closer to their own interior lives. His life was marked by brilliance and anguish, but his writing continues to challenge us—to pay attention, to imagine empathy, and to confront both the absurdity and the profundity of being alive.

If you’re drawn to the paradoxes of attention, the weight of moral reflection, and the possibilities of literature in the 21st century, exploring Wallace’s work is an invitation—not just into a body of texts, but into how we choose to live.

Feel free to let me know if you’d like a deeper dive into a particular work (like Infinite Jest or This Is Water) or analysis of his recurring themes.