William Gaddis

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.

We want someone to bring us the news.

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

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

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

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.

He tosses aside his paint-pots and his words a foot and a half long.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.

Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.

In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.