William Gaddis's Quotes

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?