William H. Gass Quotes

40 quotes in 774 categories

• The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even…
• If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
• What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
• Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
• Getting even is one reason for writing.
• I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house. It is very bad on my stomach. I…
• I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
• 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 fault…
• Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as…
• Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
• Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
• The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
• For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
• It art can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist's world and make it…
• Knowing has two poles, and they are always poles apart: carnal knowing, the laying on of hands, the hanging of the fact by head or…
• Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding…
• If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
• Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
• I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.
• We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary…

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