“He illuminated the maze brilliantly, even if he couldn’t show us the way out.”
-A.O. Scott

“You didn’t need to read his sentences twice. They were brilliant and also colloquial. How he pulled that off is a literary voodoo I might never understand. To say he will be missed is an understatement for the ages.”
-Josh Dean

“If I can consider myself a professionally and creatively satisfied twenty-something, a good share of the credit belongs to David Foster Wallace. And if I sound like a former student who was in awe of his teacher, it’s because that’s what I was. And I am.”
-Mac Barnett

“He was very funny. He was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind – and he was that, too. He was my favorite, my literary hero, I loved him and I’ll always miss him.”
-Zadie Smith

“I suddenly noticed, just as we walked outside, that the bottoms of David Foster Wallace’s white ’80s-style parachute pants were tucked into his long white socks. I suppose that was the moment after which thinking of him as ‘Dave’ seemed more appropriate.”
-Evan Lavender-Smith

“His style expressed a philosophy, or a working faith. A faith that, however we talked, we weren’t spiritually stupid. That we weren’t alone in our minds. That we were, all of us, worthy of understanding, that we were equals in the sight of God. No one can offer us hope who hasn’t looked hard at the dark, and no one offered us so much hope.”
-Lorin Stein

“There’s something very strange and uniquely powerful about meeting a guy whose writing you find world-changing but who also comes from your part of the world – and who seems exactly like someone who would have come from your part of the world. He was funny, decent to a fault, and thoroughly unpretentious. He was, as everyone has said and will say, exactly what you would hope; he was the human you wanted writing those books.”
-Dave Eggers

“Timothy McSweeney is devastated and lost.”
-McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

“Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief – I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want…so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons. Is there any way out of this bind?”
-David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky”