Quotes from William Gaddis

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.

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

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

Merry Christmas! the man threatened.

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...

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 but a shambles of apology.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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!

I really prefer books. No matter how bad a book is, it's unique, but people are all so ordinary. —I think we really like books that make us hate ourselves.

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.

What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? 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.

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

Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.

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

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.

There's much more stupidity than there is malice in the world...

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.