Quote

I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house. It is very bad on my stomach. I have to be mad to be working well anyway, and then I am mad about the way things are going on the page in addition. My ulcer flourishes and I have to chew lots of pills. When my work is going well, I am usually sort of sick.

William H. Gass

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Addition
Around
Lots
Pills
Wells
Pages
Tense
Well
Sick
Stomach
Going
Usually
Wander
Ulcer
Work
Sort
Ulcers
Way
Working
Mad
Flourishes
Things
Often
Page
Chew
House
Anyway

More quotes by William H. Gass

Image
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
Image
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
William H. Gass
Image
I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.
William H. Gass
Image
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
William H. Gass
Image
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William H. Gass