A Quote by David Foster Wallace

I wasn't all that attracted to writing originally. I read a great deal. My parents read a great deal. I do know that as my interest in tennis waned, my interest in academics increased. I mean, I started doing my homework in high school and discovering that it was somewhat fun. And then in college I barely even played on the team because just classes were much more interesting.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm a great Bible reader. I don't sit down every day and read for an hour through the Bible. But I really do read it with a great deal of pleasure... which is the last thing I would have suspected. So I read it sometimes as a devotional, but really more, not for fun, but because it's fascinating.
I felt that we started to go through the motions. Our hearts weren't there. Because we were always working on the band, and it became more about selling records than about writing and being passionate. That's why I ultimately lost interest. I don't want to speak for everybody, but I personally started to lose interest because we were doing it for the wrong reasons. It became monotony and it just wasn't fun anymore. Yeah, an obligation.
I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don't like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn't interest me because I'm not learning anything about something I'll actually have to deal with.
If it wasn't for her literally doing my homework for me, I would not have even graduated high school. Guaranteed . . . My mom always said, 'Luck is nothing but preparation and opportunity.' I think because I've had that history of not really being great in school, I probably try to overcompensate. That's why I try to read so many books. Just so I don't feel . . . uneducated.
I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.
I was playing sports all the time, growing up. And then, somewhere around 10th or 11th grade, I kind of lost interest in that and just started reading a lot. I didn't know what to read. I didn't have much direction outside of school.
I don't take a great deal of interest in party politics. Social politics interests me a great deal more.
I had lots of time to read [being a lawyer] what I hadn't read in my school and college days. Being a bad student I barely passed my exams and I barely bothered about books. It was sports all the time. I started reading and got involved in literature and writing. The few cases I handled gave me the material for my early short stories.
I'm not someone who has a list of great books I would read if I only had the time. If I want to read a particular so-called classic, I go ahead and read it. If I had more time, I would certainly read more, but I'd read the way I always do - that is, I'd read whatever happened to interest me, not necessarily classics.
I can see that "reap" and "deep," "prayers" and "bears," . . . do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.
I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.
People in tennis, they've been in a certain bubble for so long they don't even know who they are, because obviously it's just been tennis, tennis, tennis. And let it be just tennis, tennis, tennis. Be locked into that. But when tennis is done, then what? It's kinda like: Let's enjoy being great at the sport.
In high school and college, I started to read more and write science fiction myself. I was fully engaged in writing in the 1990s.
I just turned 40, and it's weird to think that I've been doing this almost my whole life. I was a child actor and then didn't do it through junior high and high school, then started up again in my late teens doing 'Young and the Restless.' Dabbled with school, went back to college, played around. I think I was doing Pleasantville at 23.
1988 I also received from the city of Vienna the cross of honour for art and science. These titles and the various honors mean a great deal to me, most of all for the reason that they would mean a great deal to my parents too.
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