David Foster Wallace on the writer's job to notice

"[W]e notice... more than we notice we notice.  A particular job of fiction is not so much to note things for people but rather to wake readers up to how observant they already are, and that’s why for me as a reader the descriptions or just toss offs that I like the most are not the ones that seem utterly new but the ones that have that eerie ‘good Lord I’ve noticed that too but have never taken a moment to articulate that myself.”

David Foster Wallace, from Conversations with David Foster Wallace

University Press of Mississippi, 2012

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