It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction’s fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can’t afford to play – the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn’t life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life – its facility, its use.

— William H. Gass

William H. Gass Quotes

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?

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass
About Stories

Surely it’s better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be.

— William H. Gass

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass
About Stories

And I am in retirement from love.

— William H. Gass

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 round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of it.

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass
Reading

If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn’t fool around writing books.

— William H. Gass

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

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.

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl’s room – a complete mess – so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.

— William H. Gass
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