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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
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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
Sex
Paragraphs
Reader
Landmarks
Looking
Paragraph
Eye
Airports
Become
Flies
Country
Reference
Passages
Speedy
Points
Restroom
More quotes by William H. Gass
What else is soul but a listener?
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
Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone — in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.
William H. Gass
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
If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
William H. Gass
What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
William H. Gass
The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.
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
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
Getting even is one reason for writing.
William H. Gass
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
I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
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
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
William H. Gass
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H. Gass
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
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
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
[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
Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
