William Gaddis

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…

Justice? – You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law.

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

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

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

How beautiful the world was when one looked at it without searching, just looked, simply and innocently.

You have to name it to claim it.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Experience is the harvest of life, and every harvest is the result of a sowing. The experience which young people must crave is that of success in some service for which they are naturally fitted.

I am from the planet of elegance.

We must have courage to bet on our ideas, take the calculated risk, and take action!

Smugglin’ that by me? That’s like tryin’ to smuggle sunrise past a rooster.

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

We each own one car, and we have a reasonable house. It’s a lovely place to be, but it’s not extravagant.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

I don’t substitute anybody else’s judgment for my own.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.

I don’t write letters anymore.

The only true test of values, either of men or of things, is that of their ability to make the world a better place in which to live.