Quotes from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace: I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid. And that the reasons…

That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we’re so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion.

Well for me, as an American male, the face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff. And my guess is that that’s been what’s going on, ever since people were hitting each other over the head with clubs. Though describable in a number of different words and cultural argots. And that our particular challenge is that there’s never been more and better stuff comin’ from the outside, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole.

Personally, I believe that if it’s assuageable in any way it’s by internal means. And I don’t know what that means. I think it’s fine in some way. I think it’s probably assuageable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin’ yourself.

It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do this.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something -- David Foster Wallace”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace: I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart. And that there’s stuff that TV and movies—although they’re great at certain things—cannot give us.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“My ambition is to not embarrass myself--which, if you know me, is a pretty serious ambition.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace: 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. 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, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious. -- David Foster Wallace”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace: There’s so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David Lipsky: Why aren't you married at thirty-four?

David Foster Wallace: You first.

David Lipsky: Um-I think it's hard to fill that role...to cast it and to fill it when you know it's for thirty or forty years...someone who, whatever mental landscape you're in, they're going to be in it too, you need someone who'll fit any landscape you can imagine.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace: I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David Foster Wallace: We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading—when really all it’s done is given us the really precious gift of making our job harder.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“But the sort of—this confusion of permissions, or this idea that pleasure and comfort are the, are really the ultimate goal and meaning of life. I think we’re starting to see a generation die … on the toxicity of that idea.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“The point of books was to combat loneliness”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you'd like to hang out with. [David Foster Wallace]'s writing self--it's most pronounced in his essays--was the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“Because we’re gonna get so interested in entertainment that we’re not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“David (David Foster Wallace) had a caffeine social gift: Her was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake - he acted on other people like a slug of coffee - so they're the five most sleepless days I every spent with anyone.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“When I think of this trip, I see David and me in the front seat of the car. It’s nighttime. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda, and smoke. (The smell of chewing tobacco is like a muddy lawn you’ve just fed a truckful of cough drops to.) The window is letting in a leak of cold air. R.E.M. is playing. The wheels are making their slightly sleepy sound of tape being stripped cleanly and endlessly off a long wall. On the other hand, we seem not to be moving at all, and the conversation is the best one I’ve ever had.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“I’m talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“I'm not sure we're any better, but able to describe the attempt to track our wandering in circles in a way that perhaps somebody else can identify with. I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“The way to finish the book is to turn down the volume on the stuff that’s all about how other people react.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“DFW: I think there are different people on the page than in real life. I do six to eight drafts of everything that I do. Um, I am probably not the smartest writer going. But I also--and I know, OK, this is gonna fit right into the persona--I work really really hard. I'm really--you give me twenty-four hours? If we'd done this interview through the mail? I could be really really really smart. I'm not all that fast. And I'm really self-conscious. And I get confused really easily. When I'm in a room by myself alone, and have enough time, I can be really really smart. And people are different that way. You know what I mean? I may not--I don't think I'm quite as smart, one-on-one with people, when I'm self-conscious, and I'm really really confused. And it's like, My dream would be for you to write this up, and then to send it to me, and I get to rewrite all my quotes to you. Which of course you'll never do...”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell “Another sensibility like mine exists.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“[We do some TV talk. He loves Seinfeld, thinks Friends is “a little gooey.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“I finished and e-mailed to myself to see what it’d read like to open, and decided it looked a little loopy and that I’d been the right person to open it after all. I read him, thought about him, and I never saw him again except on television once.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“It's just much easier with dogs. You don't get laid; but you also don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“DFW: Well, when you’re meeting a whole lot of new people and having to do things, you’re in—I’m in a constant low-level state of anxiety. Which produces adrenaline, and kind of shuts down—there’s a difference between short-term, people-based anxiety. And sort of deep, existential, you know, fear, that you feel kind of all the way down to your butthole. And that, I, that’s … that’s what I’ll have when I’m alone.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“This was the first thing I ever said, "All right, I'm gonna try to do the very best I can." Instead of doing this, "All right, I'll work at like three-quarters speed, and then I can always figure that if I just hadn't been a fuckup, the book coulda been really good." You know that defense system? You write the paper the night before, so if it doesn't get a great grade, you know that it could've been better.
And this worked--I worked as hard as I could on this. And in a weird way, you might think that would make me more nervous about whether people would like it. But there was this weird--you know like when you work out really well, there's this kind of tiredness that's real pleasant, and it's sort of placid.”
― David Lipsky, quote from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

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