Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
William H. Gass
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Kids
Change
Book
Alchemists
Writing
Alchemist
World
Gold
Lead
Words
True
More quotes by William H. Gass
When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
William H. Gass
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
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
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
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
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
I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I'm talking to these people I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it's a matter of decorum, basically.
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
[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
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
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’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
William H. Gass
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
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
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
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
What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
William H. Gass
Some people say their life is full of darkness and I wonder why they don't just try and switch the lights on.
William H. Gass
I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
William H. Gass
Getting even is one reason for writing.
William H. Gass
