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What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
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
Wants
Stories
Screw
Screws
Crafts
More quotes by William H. Gass
For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
William H. Gass
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
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
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
William H. Gass
Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.
William H. Gass
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
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
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
Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
William H. Gass
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
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
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
William H. Gass
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
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
When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
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
And I am in retirement from love.
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
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
William H. Gass
