75 Quotes by 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

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

-Money? in a voice that rustled.

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

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

They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises.

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.

success and like free enterprise and all

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.