William H. Gass - Writing Quotes

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

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

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

William H. Gass