William Gaddis

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

"Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power."

"What's an artist but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?"

"All we’ve got left to protect here is a system that’s set up to promote the meanest possibilities in human nature and make them look good."

"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 grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform.(unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions)"