Top 50 William Gaddis Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— William Gaddis

2. “None of us grew but the business.”

— William Gaddis

3. “Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.”

— William Gaddis

4. “What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.”

— William Gaddis

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest.”

— William Gaddis

9. “If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.”

— William Gaddis

10. “I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there’s always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!”

— William Gaddis

11. “Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.”

— William Gaddis

12. “He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.”

— William Gaddis

13. “It was in the Depot Tavern that he received condolences, accepted funerary offers of drink, and, when these recognitions were exhausted, he sank into the habit of talking familiarly about persons and places unknown to his cronies, so that several of them suspected him of reading.”

— William Gaddis

14. “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?”

— William Gaddis

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

— William Gaddis

16. “Free trade and Christianity, it’s the German East Africa Company, it’s French Equatorial Africa, it’s the Belgians cutting down the Congo population from twenty million to ten in barely twenty years, by nineteen fourteen there’s nothing left to plunder in Africa so they go to war with each other in Europe instead that’s what the whole damned first world war was all ab...”

— William Gaddis

17. “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

18. “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

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

— William Gaddis

20. “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.”

— William Gaddis

21. “But what I remember is the countryside then, the brilliance of outdoors and outwindows, and the sunlight streaming through the lozenge shapes of the glass, and we were locked away from it, locked inside to worship. And there was the sun out there for everyone else to see. Good God, tell me Clovis wasn’t lonely at dawn. Tell me he wasn’t sick at the sunset.”

— William Gaddis

22. “You and I doctor, on the beach.”

— William Gaddis

23. “In this world, God must serve the Devil.”

— William Gaddis

24. “Holy things and holy places, out of mind under the cauterizing brilliance of the summer son, reared up now as the winter sun struck from the south, casting shadows coldly upon the avenues where the people followed and went in, wearing winter hearts on their sleeves for the plucking.”

— William Gaddis

25. “The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality, and few ideals survive.”

— William Gaddis

26. “There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.”

— William Gaddis

27. “What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?”

— William Gaddis

28. “I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.”

— William Gaddis

29. “Someone had already remarked that Bruckner had been Hitler’s favorite composer, someone else, that there was something wrong with any young person who really enjoyed the late Beethoven; someone had already confided that the soap business in America amounted to seven million dollars a year, someone else that advertising amounted to seven billion.”

— William Gaddis

30. “Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust it’s own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink it’s teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next.”

— William Gaddis

31. “That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.”

— William Gaddis

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

— William Gaddis

Featured in: Reading Quotes

33. “The Australian sculptor who made leather sandals said that Beethoven’s duet for viola and cello sounded to him like two bulky women rummaging under a bed. Behind him a girl said, – Of course I like music, but not just to listen to.”

— William Gaddis

34. “A product would drop out of sight overnight without advertising, I don’t care what it is, a book or a brand of soap, it would drop out of sight. We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.”

— William Gaddis

35. “Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family’s tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence.”

— William Gaddis

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

— William Gaddis

37. “The lust of summer gone, the sun made its visits shorter and more uncertain, appearing to the city with that discomfited reserve that sense of duty of the lover who no longer loves.”

— William Gaddis

38. “All we’ve got left to protect here is a system that’s set up to promote the meanest possibilities in human nature and make them look good.”

— William Gaddis

39. “I can’t imagine cutting my wrists in Pokheepsie.”

— William Gaddis

40. “The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be breathed again. But the words went on, and in those brief interruptions between cigarettes the exhalations were rebreathed.”

— William Gaddis

41. “Nevertheless, they boarded The Purdue Victory and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided for against all inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God.”

— William Gaddis

42. “Their pursuits were by now so mysterious to one another that neither showed surprise at anything the other did or said, each, in fact, depending more and more heavily on the other for encouragement, an arrangement somewhat similar to that magic formula of modern marriage, whose parties are encouraged by disapprobation and disinterest respectively.”

— William Gaddis

43. “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.”

— William Gaddis

44. “We want someone to bring us the news.”

— William Gaddis

45. “A man’s damnation is his own damned business.”

— William Gaddis

46. “He had, by now, the look of a man who was waiting for something which had happened long before.”

— William Gaddis

47. “What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason?”

— William Gaddis

48. “Sincerity becomes the honesty of people who cannot be honest with themselves.”

— William Gaddis

49. “You can always see an ancient city better when it’s been bombed.”

— William Gaddis

50. “You just can’t understand anything you can’t get your hands on, anything you can’t feel or see or, or count...”

— William Gaddis