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

William Gaddis

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William Gaddis
Age: 75 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 29
Died: 1998
Died: December 16
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Standing
Writer
Audience
Reading
Nothing
Distressing
Work
Tiresome
Fronts
Front

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Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
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I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!
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We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
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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 no and where there is no refuge.
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Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it.
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Power doesn't corrupt people people corrupt power.
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How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
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If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.
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Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
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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
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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?
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It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
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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.
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He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
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That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.
William Gaddis
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What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?
William Gaddis
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We want someone to bring us the news.
William Gaddis
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...mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.
William Gaddis
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That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.
William Gaddis
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How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.
William Gaddis