It is, after all, unlikely that Rush Limbaugh always feels as jaunty and confident as he seems on the air, or that Howard Stern really is deeply fascinated by porn starlets every waking minute of the day. But a host’s persona is not the same as outright acting. For the most part, it’s probably more like the way we are all slightly different with some people than we are with others.
~ David Foster Wallace
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There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become Peregrinator americanusy Die Lumpenamerikaner. The Ugly Ones.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names.
~ David Foster Wallace
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KFI’s John Ziegler is not a journalist — he is an entertainer. Or maybe it’s better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.
~ David Foster Wallace
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The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
~ David Foster Wallace
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You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
~ David Foster Wallace
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What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
~ David Foster Wallace
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