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I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

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
Usually
Desiring
Poor
Absent
Writing
Resist
Editors
Relations
Relation
Changes
Habit

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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?
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When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
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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.
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Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
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As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.
William H. Gass
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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
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What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
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
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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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Getting even is one reason for writing.
William H. Gass
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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
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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.
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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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
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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
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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
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I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
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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The true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
William H. Gass
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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