Quotes from William Gaddis

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.

and the romantics end up anchorites in the desert.

It's just, sometimes it's just too God damned long to be able to keep believing something's real...

And finally the gray yielded to dark, the clock made another try at striking the hour, missed, waited, tried again unheard, again, until the alarm stung the silence into another sunless day

What do you mean do I go around with narcotics signing petitions painting slop writing books full of dirty words with a beard?

But not in this world: things wore out, and you lost them in a thousand ways, preposterous and unconnected with any notion of devotion, martyrdom, sacrifice

Of course, .. you need to find the defendant guilty of negligence as the proximate cause of your injuries, but that is to say even once negligence is established, since the scope of the defendant's liability can be no greater than the duty of care he owes to the plaintiff, he has not breached his duty if he has no duty and therefore he has no liability, and so in this case I suppose you would take the position that you owe a duty of care to yourself?

And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you're going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.

She can paint herself red and hang on the wall and whistle, I don't care

During the investigation, he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisectionist in Tampa, Florida; and when this failed, he settled down to sullen grumbling about the Jews, earthly vanity, and quoted bits from Ecclesiastes, Alfonso Liguori, and Pope Pius IX, in answer to any accusatory question.

and clear the mile away the wind might bring its sound from the tracks when the wind lay right, blowing off the day and finally letting the darkness settle, and damp, for day to return like a rumor of day and lurk in the sky unable to break

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

Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos.

Thank God there was the gold to forge!

Nothing can be given, which cannot also be withheld.

Nihil cavum neque sine signo apud Deum.

With nothing of value to show the fact will disappear. There is no fact but value.

No matter how you love, you cannot repay the debts contracted in the loved one's past, nor interfere with how the loved one tries to repay them. But you must pay, you do though you cannot.

might not know art but they knew what they liked

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

every work of art is a work of perfect necessity.

resurrection a dispensable preoccupation for one who had not yet lived.

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

What's an artist but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?