75 Quotes by 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?

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.

. . . 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 misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon . . .

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

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

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

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?