David Foster Wallace on people watching for fiction writers

“Fiction writers tend to be oglers.  They tend to lurk and to stare.  They are born watchers.  They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow.  Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food.  Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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