William H. Gass Quotes

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

What else is soul but a listener?

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

When reviewers take the trouble to compliment a writer on her style, it is usually because she has made it easy for them to slide from one sentence to another like an otter down a slope.

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

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 particles it builds a world.

Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.

If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.

Some people say their life is full of darkness and I wonder why they don't just try and switch the lights on.

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.

Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.

If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return?

Getting even is one reason for writing.

The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

And I am in retirement from love.

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 reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.

I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing.

When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.

I cannot walk under the wires. The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection.

I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.

What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.

As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.

The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.

They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.

Excellence is inconveniently difficult.

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life

One thing—one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.