All of the below is culled from the wonderful book named "Conversations with David Foster Wallace", which I strongly recommend buying:

Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace, by Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk/1993 From Whiskey Island, Spring 1993.

WALLACE: I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t start writing fiction until I was twenty-one, and at the beginning we all have to write our requisite amounts of shit, and my shit was basically disguised essays.

[...]

But there are a few books I have read that I’ve never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know that much about you as I don’t know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with … I don’t want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. Or really to affect people. I think sometimes what I’m doing, if I try to be particularly offensive or outrageous or whatever, is just being really hungry for some kind of effect. I think you can see Bret Ellis doing that in American Psycho. You can’t make sure that everybody’s going to like you, but damn it, if you’ve got some skill you can make sure that people don’t ignore you. A lot of writers hunger to have their work out there more and to have good book sales, which I used to think was crass materialism, that they wanted the money, but it turns out that what you want is to have some sort of effect. Maybe you’ve snapped to this already. It took me years to figure that out.

GP: Are there any writers now living that really knock you out?

WALLACE: I’m a huge Don DeLillo fan, although I think his latest book is one of his worst. The DeLillo of Americana and End Zone and Great Jones Street, The Names, and Libra I love. Maybe Gravity’s Rainbow is a better book, but I can’t think of anybody in this tradition since Nabokov who’s put out a better corpus of work than DeLillo. I like Bellow, and I really like the early John Updike—The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm, The Centaur, just in terms of sheer fucking beautiful writing. There are a lot of the Latinists too: Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, both recently dead. There are young writers now I was telling you about, like Mark Leyner; William T. Vollman, who’s got four books coming out this year; Jon Franzen, Susan Daitch, Amy Homes. The best book I’ve read recently is by Paul Auster’s wife, who’s named Siri Hustvedt. She’s a Norwegian from Minnesota, who wrote this book called The Blindfold. It’s not a lot of fun, but God is it smart. It’s the best piece of feminist postmodernism I’ve ever read. It makes Kathy Acker look sick because it’s so well crafted. I’m not sure there are any really towering giants. I think some Pynchon, some Bellow, some Ozick will be read a hundred years from now; I think DeLillo, maybe.

GP: Do you have any advice for young writers?

WALLACE: Send me at least 50 percent of everything that you make.

GP: That won’t even cover the postage!

WALLACE: This is a long haul. Writing is a long haul. I’m hoping that none of the stuff that I’ve done so far is anywhere close to the best stuff I can do. Let’s hope we’re not fifty-five and doing the same thing. I’d say avoid burning out. You can burn out by struggling in privation and neglect for many years, but you can also burn out if you’re given a little bit of attention. People come to your hotel room and think you have interesting things to say. You can allow that to make you start to think that you can’t say anything unless it’s interesting. For me, 50 percent of the stuff I do is bad, and that’s just going to be the way it is, and if I can’t accept that then I’m not cut out for this. The trick is to know what’s bad and not let other people see it.