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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
Screw
Screws
Crafts
Wants
Stories
More quotes by William H. Gass
The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.
William H. Gass
The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences.
William H. Gass
Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
William H. Gass
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
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
I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
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
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
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
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
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
If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
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
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
I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room--a complete mess--so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.
William H. Gass
Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
William H. Gass
What else is soul but a listener?
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
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