Infinite Jest

learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you.

John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a-shoe school.

Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

‘The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.’

‘Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’ ‘I give.’ ‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’

He has this way of looking warily to either side of him before he says anything.

The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he’d say over the newspaper.