William Gaddis Quotes (11 Quotes)

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?

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

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.

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.

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

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

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

. . . That's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight . . . that's what I have to go into before all my work is misunder

Can't you see you go public and all these people owning you want is dividends and running their stock up, you don't give them that and they sell you out, you do and some bunch of vice presidents some place you never heard of like the ones that turned this out, this wood product they call it, they spot you and launch an offer and all of a sudden you're working for them trimming and cutting and finally bringing in people to turn something out they don't care what the hell it is, there's no pride in their work because what you've got them turning out nobody could be proud of in the first place.

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