William Gaddis

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

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.

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

I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which ‘The Recognitions’ ’ debt to ‘Ulysses’ was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read ‘Ulysses.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

It is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

A sudden bold and unexpected question does many times surprise a man and lay him open.

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

The pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

To get a name can happen but to few; it is one of the few things that cannot be brought. It is the free gift of mankind, which must be deserved before it will be granted, and is at last unwillingly bestowed.