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

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
Genders
Unquestionably
Genres
Feminine
Gender
Genre
Fiction
Would

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Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
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I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
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it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.
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Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
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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.
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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
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I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
William H. Gass
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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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And I am in retirement from love.
William H. Gass
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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
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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
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The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
William H. Gass
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The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
William H. Gass
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My face is muffled in my mother's clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.
William H. Gass
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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
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What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
William H. Gass
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When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
William H. Gass
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What else is soul but a listener?
William H. Gass
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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
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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