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It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
William H. Gass
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William H. Gass
Age: 93 †
Born: 1924
Born: July 30
Died: 2017
Died: December 6
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Military Officer
Novelist
Prosaist
University Teacher
Writer
Fargo
North Dakota
William Howard Gass
Flesh
Poetry
Fiction
Word
Writing
Made
More quotes by William H. Gass
[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
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
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
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
The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.
William H. Gass
I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I've done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don't complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words he needed them. But these other people [modern philosophers] are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.
William H. Gass
The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
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
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
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
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
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 don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.
William H. Gass
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William H. Gass
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
William H. Gass
Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify 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
And I am in retirement from love.
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
