Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it.

William Gaddis

Categorized in : Art Feelings Creating

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.

William Gaddis

apology artist men

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

William Gaddis

cultivation ignorance stupid

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

William Gaddis

law justice world

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.

William Gaddis

piano-playing piano-music player

Power doesn't corrupt people; people corrupt power.

William Gaddis

dictator power people

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.

William Gaddis

drawing heart hands

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

William Gaddis

bliss childhood knows

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as "rank presumption".

William Gaddis

responsibility tree men

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

William Gaddis

asking wish morning

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

William Gaddis

ifs want people

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

William Gaddis

comic

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

William Gaddis

standing-alone audience reading

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

William Gaddis

self age enemy

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

William Gaddis

ifs doe beautiful

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

William Gaddis

moments real past

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

William Gaddis

boredom blessing book

We want someone to bring us the news.

William Gaddis

news crafts want

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

William Gaddis

memento this-world world

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.

William Gaddis

telephones long mean

That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.

William Gaddis

bounce i-can knows