William Gaddis Quote
The coincidences turn up down to the smallest details. There is, for instance, a character who has covered the mirrors with handkerchiefs. Apparently this happens somewhere in , too. And they said, Ah! This is where he got that. Where I got it was when I was in a hotel in Panama and I had washed my handkerchiefs and spread them on the windows and the mirrors to dry—they almost look pressed when they’re peeled away that way—a Panamanian friend came in and said, All the mirrors are covered. Who’s dead? What’s happened? I said, No, I’m just drying my handkerchiefs. Then I found the same incident in in what? 1903 or 1905, whenever was written. This always strikes me as dangerous—finding sources.
William Gaddis
The coincidences turn up down to the smallest details. There is, for instance, a character who has covered the mirrors with handkerchiefs. Apparently this happens somewhere in , too. And they said, Ah! This is where he got that. Where I got it was when I was in a hotel in Panama and I had washed my handkerchiefs and spread them on the windows and the mirrors to dry—they almost look pressed when they’re peeled away that way—a Panamanian friend came in and said, All the mirrors are covered. Who’s dead? What’s happened? I said, No, I’m just drying my handkerchiefs. Then I found the same incident in in what? 1903 or 1905, whenever was written. This always strikes me as dangerous—finding sources.
Tags:
inspiration, sources
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About William Gaddis
The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005
and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002). The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
A MacArthur Fellow, Gaddis is widely considered one of the first and most important American postmodern writers.