episode 3 (nrqfdlaocyeubyartwdfw)

non-random quotes from David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace:

“This stuff is real bad for me, it makes me self-conscious. The more exposure I as a person get, the more it hurts me as a writer. But I said yes to this, so that I could in good conscience say no to a couple other things that are just way more toxic. And that’s what I get out of it.”

“I haven’t read a lot of the new stuff that’s come out over the last few years. Like Steve Erickson, and Tours of the Black Clock—it’s really f*cking good. I thought Bret Ellis’s first book, I thought it was very, very powerful. American Psycho—I thought he was really ill-served by his agent and publisher even letting him publish it, and those are the only two things of his that I read. But that’s, I think this is another danger: you get lavishly rewarded for that first book, and it’s gonna be very difficult for him ever to do anything else. I mean there’s gonna be part of you that just wants to do that over and over and over again, so you continue to get the food pellets of praise. It’s one more way that all this stuff is toxic.”

“I just missed like four years of this. And I’m not sorry not to be part of that world anymore. I just—there’s nothing but envy, and sort of puffery, and all that stuff in it. And it’s not like I’m above it. It’s just that it—the amount that it hurts me, outweighs whatever good feelings it gives me.”