Quote

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

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
Fingers
Whose
Expression
Movement
Falsify
Write
Descent
Thought
Suggests
Writing
Movements
Something
Immediately

More quotes by William H. Gass

Image
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
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
Getting even is one reason for writing.
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
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
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
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
Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
William H. Gass
Image
The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.
William H. Gass
Image
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William H. Gass
Image
And I am in retirement from love.
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
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 death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.
William H. Gass
Image
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H. Gass
Image
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
Image
I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
William H. Gass