Quotes by William Gaddis

About William Gaddis:

William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002). The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

William Gaddis

Justice? -- You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law.

William Gaddis

Has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced ...

William Gaddis

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

success and like free enterprise and all

William Gaddis

Women get desperate, but they don't understand despair.

William Gaddis

The ship's surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string, The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally b...

William Gaddis

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

William Gaddis

Venerable age had not, for him, arranged that derelict landscape against which it is privileged to sit and pick its nose, break wind, and damn the course of youth groping among the obstacles erected, dutifully, by its own hands earlier, along the way...

William Gaddis

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

William Gaddis

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

William Gaddis

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

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

William Gaddis

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

William Gaddis

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

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

William Gaddis

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religiou...

William Gaddis

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

William Gaddis

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.

William Gaddis

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

Author Bio

  • NameWilliam Gaddis
  • DescriptionNovelist
  • BornDecember 29, 1922
  • DiedDecember 16, 1998
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • WorksThe Recognitions; J R; A Frolic Of His Own
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; National Book Award