William Gaddis

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

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.

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!

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? 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.

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

Let them look up in the sky then…! if they must be so blind, that cannot see the truth in broad daylight, but must have the whole world in darkness to see the conceit of the stars…

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

I do not hesitate to read all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable – any real insight or broad human sentiment.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

Can you really explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

It is all right to rat, but you can’t re-rat.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

When you place yourself in a position to help another, you will discover your greater capabilities.

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.