William Gaddis quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by William Gaddis

William Gaddis Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from William Gaddis on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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.

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

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

Power does not corrupt people, people corrupt people.

...he chose, not the disquieting road to serenity, but the serenely narrow path to eventual and total derangement.

None of us grew but the business.

- 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(...)

Mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

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

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible ...

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

Merry Christmas! the man threatened.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

Where would Christianity be today if Jesus had been given ten to twenty with time off for good behavior

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Are a good thing for America, they help keep the homosexuals off the streets.

There's much more stupidity than there is malice in the world ...

That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.

I can't imagine cutting my wrists in Pokheepsie

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!

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

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.

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people ...

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

You and I doctor, on the beach.

I'll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they've stopped caring.

We want someone to bring us the news.

Stupidity's the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

...the face of Christ in your van der Goes, no one could call that a lie.

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

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

That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.

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?

The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality, and few ideals survive.

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.

We've had the goddam Ages of Faith, we've had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity

In this world, God must serve the Devil.

success and like free enterprise and all

-Money? in a voice that rustled.

Do you know why the French are so honest? because there are so few words in their language they're forced to be.

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

A man's damnation is his own damned business.