William Gaddis

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

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

Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.

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

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

The intuitive recognition of the instant, thus reality… is the highest act of wisdom.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Awareness is the greatest agent for change.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.