The End of the Tour

David Lipsky:
Nice view.

David Foster Wallace:
Thank you. I can't take credit for it.

David Foster Wallace:
This piece would be so much better if it was just you. Just keep talking, you'll save me a lot of trouble.

David Foster Wallace:
I'm not so sure you want to be me.

David Lipsky:
I don't.

David Lipsky:
He wants more than he has. I want precisely what he already has.

David Foster Wallace:
Well, I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people.

David Foster Wallace:
- it may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It's just the feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn't function.

David Foster Wallace:
Yes, you're performing muscular movements with your hand as you're jerking off. But what you're really doing, I think, is you're running a movie in your head. You're having a fantasy relationship with somebody who is not real... strictly to stimulate a neurological response. So as the Internet grows in the next 10, 15 years... and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality, we're gonna have to develop some real machinery inside our guts... to turn off pure, unalloyed pleasure. Or, I don't know about you, I'm gonna have to leave the planet. 'Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier... and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable... to sit alone with images on a screen... given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that's fine in low doses, but if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die.

David Lipsky:
Well, come on.

David Foster Wallace:
In a meaningful way, you're going to die.