William Gaddis Quotes

28 quotes in 370 categories

• We want someone to bring us the news.
• How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
• I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary…
• Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share…
• What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?
• Power doesn't corrupt people; people corrupt power.
• He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at…
• There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
• We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
• Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
• Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
• That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed,…
• If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.
• If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money
• What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done…
• It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
• How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible...
• ...mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.
• Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had…
• Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

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