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?”

“-Money? in a voice that rustled.”

“Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.”

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

“The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be breathed again. But the words went on, and in those brief interruptions between cigarettes the exhalations were rebreathed.”

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

“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”

“Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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