William H. Gass Quotes

He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weed...

Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another ...

Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening—here Orcutt...

Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in...

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature ...

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

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

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we d...

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old...

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder...

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

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

Excellence is inconveniently difficult.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban li...

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your car...

If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question....

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and...

I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single word...

Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments...

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? O...

Sure, there are good things, lots, sure, blow jobs, chocolate mousse, winning streaks, the warm fire...

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granari...

The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point phys...

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

Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vdgetables to dominate our tongues...