William Gaddis quotes:

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.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

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

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

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

There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.

Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.

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?

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

We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

Power doesn't corrupt people; people corrupt power.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible...

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.

...mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

TO A CHILD, BEHELD IN SUMMER RAIMENTLittle girl, one lesser garmentwill suffice to clothe your crotch,Hide that undiscovered cavernWhere old Time will wind his watch."

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

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...

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".

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

We want someone to bring us the news.

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

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?