William Gaddis

We want someone to bring us the news.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I have such a high regard for the truth that I use it sparingly.

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

When in doubt tell the truth.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish your opinions.

Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth… and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.