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Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. 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." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. 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." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.

Approximate author period: c. 1985 AD · modern

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Attribution & collection notes
Author or tradition
David Foster Wallace
Attribution: attributed
Country attributed
Not established
A country attribution does not establish the earliest origin.
Historical period
Approximate author period: c. 1985 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from life dates 1962 to 2008; Wikidata Q313246, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q313246 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken.
Recorded source
Contributor-provided quotation collection

Supplied reference C; CSV row 148727; supplied attribution, independently unverified

A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.