Literary Birthday – 29 December – William Gaddis

William Gaddis was born 29 December 1922, and died 16 December 1998.

Nine Quotes

1. How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
2. If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.
3. There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
4. Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.
5. 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
6. Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
7. I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.
8. How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible…
9. I really prefer books. No matter how bad a book is, it’s unique, but people are all so ordinary.

William Gaddis was an American novelist. His first novel, the monumental The Recognitions, was nearly one thousand pages long. Over the years a growing number of critics came to see it as possibly the greatest American novel of the century. The Recognitions was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Gaddis_1975.jpg

ebay.com, front of photo, back of photo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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