From David Lipsky's "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace"; all lines in italics are David Lipsky speaking, everything else is David Foster Wallace:

I don’t know you, but I’ll bet there’ll come a time when you realize you’re always gonna have about as much success as you need, and that’s fine. Where you’ll just feel like you can draw a free breath about it. And maybe not for all time—it’s just, that’s sort of, that’s the best thing about what’s going on right now. Is I feel like, “You know what? This doesn’t run me.” And it’s flattering to have Rolling Stone send you out here. But it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean to me what it would have meant to me ten years ago. And I realize that that’s precious.

Why?

Because if it means that much to me, then I’m real fragile and real breakable. ’Cause what if you don’t come? Or what if you don’t like me? Or what if the next thing gets a bad review, you know what I mean? ’Cause then I’m like—what am I like? Well, then I’m like something made of glass, that has to be treated just a certain way or he breaks. Right? And I don’t mean, I mean, I’m not a guru, it’s not like I’m exempt from this stuff. I just remember real well how much it used to mean.

What would it have meant ten years ago?

I think it probably would have just hastened things. Because it would have been absolutely great, I would have tried incredibly hard to impress you, in about a thousand different ways. Would have put on a whole lot of faux stuff, you would have left, I would have waited on tenterhooks for the article, the article would have come out. And if it wasn’t savage, I would have had exactly an hour of a kind of greasy thrill about it. And then there would have been a feeling of utter emptiness. Which is the feeling of, “Now I’m back to being made of glass, what’s the next thing I’m going to find that’s gonna handle me just right?” You know what I mean?

And it’s not like that I’m not like that at all, anymore. But I’m just like, I know that when all this is over—I know that the biggest part of me is looking forward to all this bein’ over, so I can get back to work. And that that’s the most important thing. And that that’s good because I can live that way. I can’t—if I depend on this, then I’m gonna be miserable except for once every five years? You know what I mean?

[Screwing up his face]

And on fear of how "Infinite Jest" would be received:

What were you afraid of in the reception of the book?

I was afraid people would think it was sloppy, poorly—that it would seem like a mess. Instead of an intentional, very careful mess. That it would seem … But the fact that she would think that this was just every thought I seemed to have for three years put down on the page, just made my bowels turn to ice. [Re: Michiko Kakutani]

Because that was of course the great dark terror when I was writing it. Is that that’s how it would come off. So seeing that she really really liked Updike was a tremendous shot in the arm. [Updike’s "In the Beauty of the Lilies"]

Why?

Because Updike, I think, has never had an unpublished thought. And that he’s got an ability to put it in very lapidary prose. But that Updike presents one with a compressed Internet problem, is there’s 80 percent absolute dreck, and 20 percent priceless stuff. And you just have to wade through so much purple gorgeous empty writing to get to anything that’s got any kind of heartbeat in it. Plus, I think he’s mentally ill.

You really do, don’t you?

Yeah. I think he’s a nasty person. And I’ll tell you, if you think I hate him? Talk to—bring up his name to [to J. Franzen].

[Break]