Top 69 William Gaddis Quotes
#1. What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey
William Gaddis
#2. Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.
William Gaddis
#3. How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
William Gaddis
#4. I'll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they've stopped caring.
William Gaddis
#5. Where would Christianity be today if Jesus had been given ten to twenty with time off for good behavior
William Gaddis
#7. Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. William Gaddis, The Recognitions.
William Gaddis
#8. 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?
William Gaddis
#9. It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one's exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.
William Gaddis
#10. 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.
William Gaddis
#11. That after an hour's silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness ... That's all, it took him an hour to work that out.
William Gaddis
#12. I, it's just, listen, criticism? It's the most important art now, it's the one we need most now. Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don't you see? not the "if I'd done it myself . . ." Yes, a, a disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions
William Gaddis
#14. 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.
William Gaddis
#15. 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?
William Gaddis
#16. Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.
William Gaddis
#17. ...he chose, not the disquieting road to serenity, but the serenely narrow path to eventual and total derangement.
William Gaddis
#18. That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.
William Gaddis
#19. He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.
William Gaddis
#20. Do you know why the French are so honest? because there are so few words in their language they're forced to be.
William Gaddis
#21. He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
William Gaddis
#22. There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
William Gaddis
#24. The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality, and few ideals survive.
William Gaddis
#25. TO A CHILD, BEHELD IN SUMMER RAIMENT
Little girl, one lesser garment
will suffice to clothe your crotch,
Hide that undiscovered cavern
Where old Time will wind his watch.
William Gaddis
#27. Stupidity's the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
William Gaddis
#28. -I'm reviewing it, the stooped man said, and started to plod off.
-You read it?
-No, he said over his shoulder, -but I know the son of a bitch who wrote it.
William Gaddis
#30. The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...
William Gaddis
#31. 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!
William Gaddis
#32. Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people ...
William Gaddis
#33. He took off his hat and shook it (having hurried home as though his own coronation were waiting), and moved now with the slow deliberation of lonely people who have time for every meager requirement of their lives.
William Gaddis
#34. The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.
William Gaddis
#35. - 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.
William Gaddis
#36. The function of this school is custodial. It's here to keep these kids off the streets until the girls are big enough to get pregnant and the boys are old enough to go out and hold up a gas station.
William Gaddis
#37. Mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.
William Gaddis
#38. - What shall I do, in a Purgatory?... where they all speak spanish? I've never been in any kind of Purgatory before, and no one(...)
William Gaddis
#39. She can paint herself red and hang on the wall and whistle, I don't care
William Gaddis
#40. If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.
William Gaddis
#41. 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.
William Gaddis
#42. 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
William Gaddis
#43. I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which 'The Recognitions' ' debt to 'Ulysses' was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read 'Ulysses.
William Gaddis
#44. How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible ...
William Gaddis
#45. Let them look up in the sky then ... ! if they must be so blind, that cannot see the truth in broad daylight, but must have the whole world in darkness to see the conceit of the stars ...
William Gaddis
#46. The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France.
William Gaddis
#47. It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
William Gaddis
#48. 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 ...
William Gaddis
#49. Get a black suit and just freeload, problem it's too God damned late now even to be any of the things I never wanted to be.
William Gaddis
#50. Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.
William Gaddis
#51. Power does not corrupt people, people corrupt people.
William Gaddis
#52. Women get desperate, but they don't understand despair.
William Gaddis
#53. We've had the goddam Ages of Faith, we've had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity
William Gaddis
#54. There's much more stupidity than there is malice in the world ...
William Gaddis
#55. That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.
William Gaddis
#56. Even in sleep, he was waiting, a little tense like everyone waiting within reach of a telephone, for it to ring. And still, even in sleep, he knew there would be time. Adam, after all, lived for nine hundred thirty years.
William Gaddis
#59. Are a good thing for America, they help keep the homosexuals off the streets.
William Gaddis
#60. ...the face of Christ in your van der Goes, no one could call that a lie.
William Gaddis
#61. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises.
William Gaddis
#62. Justice?
You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law.
William Gaddis
#63. We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
William Gaddis
#64. All we've got left to protect here is a system that's set up to promote the meanest possibilities in human nature and make them look good.
William Gaddis
#67. Holy things and holy places, out of mind under the cauterizing brilliance of the summer son, reared up now as the winter sun struck from the south, casting shadows coldly upon the avenues where the people followed and went in, wearing winter hearts on their sleeves for the plucking.
William Gaddis
#68. Fragments of a conversation she had left a little earlier (on Rilke, not Rilke's poetry but Rilke the man, who refused to be psychoanalyzed for fear of purging his genius);
William Gaddis
#69. Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.
William Gaddis
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