William Gaddis

What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

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

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

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?

It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

Dare to think for yourself.

Fidelity is the sister of justice.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.