When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid. — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books. — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“I began, I remember, because I felt I had to. I'd reached that modest height in my career, that gentle rise, from… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins;… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex. — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy. — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“Try to remember that artists in these catastrophic times, along with the serious scientists, are the only salvation for us, if there is to… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid. — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“It's a simple world for her. A curtain fluttering - that's how she is - lives, moves - obediently, yet with every appearnace of… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“I dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river. I'd follow a vein with the point of my… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“Yes, we call it recursive, the act of reading, of looping the loop, of continually returning to an earlier group of words, behaving like… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
“Then let us have a language worthy of our world, a democratic style where rich and well-born nouns can roister with some sluttish verb… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of… — William H. Gass Copy Share Image
