William H. Gass Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you.

William H. Gass
One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.

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

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
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
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
The alcoholic trance is not just a haze, as though the eyes were also unshaven. It is not a mere buzzing in the ears, a dizzinessor disturbance of balance. One arrives in the garden again, at nursery time, when the gentle animals are fed and in all the world there are only toys.

William H. Gass
How do we know, then, when a code's been cracked?when we are right?when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered.

William H. Gass
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.

William H. Gass
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.

William H. Gass
Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste. There isn't very much satisfaction in getting the world to accept and praise you for things that the world is prepared to praise. The world is prepared to praise only shit.
The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 65, Issue 70, Summer 1977

William H. Gass
When you decide to change your handwriting, and when you sit down and spend a day or more making new characters, you've got to be in an outraged and outrageous state of mind.
The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 65, Issue 70, Summer 1977

William H. Gass
I have no skepticism about language. I know it can bamboozle. But I am a believer.
The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 65, Issue 70, Summer 1977

William H. Gass
I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, I feel metaphorically, see metaphorically.

William H. Gass
Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough — whatever it takes.

William H. Gass
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 have to be mad to be working well anyway, and then I am mad about the way things are going on the page in addition. My ulcer flourishes and I have to chew lots of pills. When my work is going well, I am usually sort of sick.

William H. Gass
If anything in writing comes easily, unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor.

William H. Gass
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

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

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

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

William H. Gass
Autobiography is a life writing its life. Every moment a bit of the self slides away toward its station in the past, where it will be remembered partially, if at all... and then rendered even more incompletely... by the play of the pen.

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

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

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

William H. Gass
Getting even is one great reason for writing. The precise statement of the motive is tricky, but the clearest expression of my unwholesome nature and my mean motives (apart from trying to write well) appears in a line I like in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. The character says, I want to rise so high that when I shit I won't miss anybody. But maybe I say it's a motive because I like the line. Anyway, my work proceeds almost always from a sense of aggression. And usually I am in my best working mood when I am, on the page, very combative, very hostile. That's true even when I write to praise, as is often the case.

William H. Gass