Aging & Wisdom Quote by David Foster Wallace

Wallace is naming the most embarrassing paradox in literary ambition: the writer who wants your approval so badly it curdles into contempt. The line nails a posture that anyone who’s read (or tried to write) late-20th-century “smart” fiction will recognize: the performance of intimacy that’s also a power play. “Desperate desire to please” signals a hunger for connection and validation; “hostility to the reader” exposes the defensive armor that forms when that hunger feels risky. If I need you, I might also resent you for having the ability to judge me.

The sentence works because it refuses the flattering myth of the reader as a beloved collaborator. Wallace makes the reader an antagonist by implication: not evil, just capable of withholding the very thing the writer is chasing. That’s the psychological engine behind a lot of showy difficulty, irony, and preemptive snark. It’s not merely “experimental” technique; it’s a strategy for never being caught wanting. If the work stays one step ahead - cleverer, denser, more self-aware - then rejection can be reframed as the reader’s failure, not the writer’s need.

Context matters: Wallace came up in an era trained in irony as both style and shield, when sincerity read as naivete and earnestness risked humiliation. His best essays and fiction circle this bind obsessively, trying to invent a voice that can be smart without being smug, intimate without being manipulative. The quote is less confession than diagnosis: a warning about what happens when art becomes a covert contract for love, and the fine print is resentment.