William H Gass quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by William H Gass

Top William H Gass Quotes

Browse top 62 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by William H Gass.

Favorite William H Gass Quotes

1. "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

2. "Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night..." ~ William H. Gass

3. "So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there's one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them" ~ William H. Gass

4. "Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal" ~ William H. Gass

5. "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

6. "As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour" ~ William H. Gass

7. "We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough." ~ William H. Gass

8. "Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated." ~ William H. Gass

9. "The word itself has another color. It's not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn't the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow's deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn't violet's rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green." ~ William H. Gass

10. "In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can't pick up a page. All the words slide off." ~ William H. Gass

11. "If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.)" ~ William H. Gass

12. "A cause is a lie with a fan club." ~ William H. Gass

13. "He wanted to sink down and hug the coals to his chest. Flamboyant...coins of light...oil, wood, tatters...fumes from acids, soap, smoke...the sunlight shattered." ~ William H. Gass

14. "Why were they whining then?...whining, damn them, whining… Because they'd have to give up their hope of living like an animal and return to an honest, conscious, human life. The prospect was hard." ~ William H. Gass

15. "Look: if a bird were to rub its beak on a limb, you'd hear it—sure—and if a piece of water were to move an unaccustomed way, you'd feel it—that's right—and if a fox were to steal a hen, you'd see-you'd see it—even in the middle of the night; but, heaven help you, if a friend a friend—god—were to slit your throat with his—his love—hoh, you'd bleed a week to notice it." ~ William H. Gass

16. "Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup." ~ William H. Gass

17. "The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim's friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world." ~ William H. Gass

18. "Furthermore, the initial page, always crucial, passed every test, with its promises and divisions, its portentous opening paragraph like the great door of a church, its exotic setting and strange names, the rolling orchestration of its prose." ~ William H. Gass

19. "The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words." ~ William H. Gass

20. "And I am in retirement from love." ~ William H. Gass

21. "[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self." ~ William H. Gass

22. "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

23. "Alas, the penis is such a ridiculous petitioner. It is so unreliable, though everything depends on it—the world is balanced on it like a ball on a seal's nose. It is so easily teased, insulted, betrayed, abandoned; yet it must pretend to be invulnerable, a weapon which confers magical powers upon its possessor; consequently this muscleless inchworm must try to swagger through temples and pull apart thighs like the hairiest Samson, the mightiest ram." ~ William H. Gass

24. "Ah, but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow?" ~ William H. Gass

25. "Yes, we call it recursive, the act of reading, of looping the loop, of continually returning to an earlier group of words, behaving like Penelope by moving our mind back and forth, forth and back, reweaving what's unwoven, undoing what's been done; and language, which regularly returns us to its origin, which starts us off again on the same journey, older, altered, Columbus one more time, but better prepared each later voyage, knowing a bit more, ready for more, equal to a greater range of tasks, calmer, confident—after all, we've come this way before, have habits that help, and a favoring wind—language like that is the language which takes us inside, inside the sentence—inside—inside the mind—inside—inside, where meanings meet and are modified, reviewed and revised, where no perception, no need, no feeling or thought need be scanted or shunted aside." ~ William H. Gass

26. "Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf." ~ William H. Gass

27. "i suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called coach." ~ William H. Gass

28. "...yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between." ~ William H. Gass

29. "Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form, and when the hurdler's scissored legs and outstretched arms carry him over the bars, the limp in his life, the headache in his heart, the emptiness he's full of, are as absent as his street-shoes, which will pinch and scrape his feet in all the old leathery ways once the race is over and he has to walk through the front door of his future like a brushman with some feckless patter and a chintzy plastic prize." ~ William H. Gass

30. "We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us." ~ William H. Gass

31. "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 we try to understand anyone—in order to know them better, not in order to know something else." ~ William H. Gass

32. "...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead." ~ William H. Gass

33. "The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not." ~ William H. Gass

34. "Honey, you are a baby in this world and don't know how to howl yet." ~ William H. Gass

35. "For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, those streams of—what?—of science. Death in such a case would be only another arrangement." ~ William H. Gass

36. "The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it." ~ William H. Gass

37. "Myth murdering myth: that's war these days." ~ William H. Gass

38. "Nature punishes gluttony, not avarice or hate." ~ William H. Gass

39. "It's a simple world for her. A curtain fluttering - that's how she is - lives, moves - obediently, yet with every appearnace of freedom and caprice." ~ William H. Gass

40. "The arts of conversation which his circle cultivated were, in great part, the gossipacious arts: that of making much out of little, of displaying your wit and inventive facility, your ability to amuse, without boring your listeners with too many ideas, or unpleasantly stretching their minds on the rack of an "issue." It was a world which took an intense but mainly anecdotal interest in people, and which was therefore also on its guard against just the same exposure of itself which it so assiduously sought to gain against others." ~ William H. Gass

41. "He hated not being heard, having to shout at the insides of himself, having to live in his dreams the way he lived in one of his rented rooms, being opposed, denied, neglected, refused. Kicked out." ~ William H. Gass

42. "So it's true: Being without Being is blue." ~ William H. Gass

43. "Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life." ~ William H. Gass

44. "...until summer becomes ein Zimmer in einem Traum -- a room in a dream." ~ William H. Gass

45. "... no one could say, looking at her lined, pale and puffy face, the shapeless garish sack she had double-pinned around her, or the misfocusing eyes and slack wet mouth, that she had led the right life, and she knew it, not even with Freud's fist could she repress that..." ~ William H. Gass

46. "When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid." ~ William H. Gass

47. "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

48. "Getting even is one reason for writing." ~ William H. Gass

49. "It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word" ~ William H. Gass

50. "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." ~ William H. Gass

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Today's Quote

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive."
Author: Anne Lamott

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