David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

I’m 35, and I think for the generation that starts with me or a couple years younger, the whole defining thing is that there can be no spokesman. It’s completely atomized, and there’s nothing like a kind of unified consciousness the way there was, I don’t know, in the ’60s, or even during that kind of conservative spasm in the ’80s.

Oh, golly. Ever since I was in college, I’ve been an enormous fan of both Joan Didion and Pauline Kael. And I don’t know—I think prosewise, Pauline Kael is unequaled.

I think the cruise essay was about 110 pages, and I think it ended up getting cut just about in half. And every time I’d bitch and moan to Harper’s, they would say, well, this is still, this is going to be the longest thing we’ve ever put in Harper’s. At which point I would have to shut up or look like even a bigger prima donna than I am.