Infinite Jest

John Wayne is of the sock-and-a-shoe, sock-and-a-shoe school.

learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you.

thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us — how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why.

He has this way of looking warily to either side of him before he says anything.

‘Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’ ‘I give.’ ‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he’d say over the newspaper.

Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms.

‘The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.’

And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet?