William Gaddis Quotations

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 world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?

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.

He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.

. . . That's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight . . . that's what I have to go into before all my work is misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon . . .

Can't you see you go public and all these people owning you want is dividends and running their stock up, you don't give them that and they sell you out, you do and some bunch of vice presidents some place you never heard of like the ones that turned this out, this wood product they call it, they spot you and launch an offer and all of a sudden you're working for them trimming and cutting and finally bringing in people to turn something out they don't care what the hell it is, there's no pride in their work because what you've got them turning out nobody could be proud of in the first place.

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 said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

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?

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!

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

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.

We want someone to bring us the news.

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 the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?

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, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

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 the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as "rank presumption".

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

Power doesn't corrupt people; people corrupt power.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it...

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

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 but a shambles of apology.