David Foster Wallace, on Roger Federer:

Imagine that you’re a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you’re playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it.

Wallace seems to be unintentionally describing here what it’s like to be the kind of writer he is. I gather that his own experience is not that he is particularly intelligent or observant or articulate, but rather that the things he wants to describe, imagine, evoke, etc., appear to him perfectly obvious and right within reach; and that, when it comes to writing these things down, the whole breadth of the English language appears quite compact and unbelievably easy to use.