The Gaddis Annotations

Notes on the works of the great 20th-century novelist

William Gaddis

“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.”

–from his acceptance speech for the National Book Award in Fiction for J R , April 1976