William Gaddis
William Gaddis
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr.was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place. The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth29 December 1922
CountryUnited States of America
How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
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.
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.
What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?
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.
There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
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".
He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
Power doesn't corrupt people; people corrupt power.
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...
Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
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.