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

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

He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.

Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power.

The ship’s surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string, The buttons down the front of...

What is it they want from the man that they didn’t get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he’s done with his work, what’s any artist but the dregs...

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

Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance

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

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

Women get desperate, but they don’t understand despair.

. . . That’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight . . ....

Has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has...

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high...

Can’t you see you go public and all these people owning you want is dividends and running their stock up, you don’t give them that and they sell you out, you do and some bunch...

maturity”, animated lives around him, it might be said that Reverend Gwyon had reached maturity.

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

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or...

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

Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest.” William Gaddis, The Recognitions.