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When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.
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
Book
Always
Furrowed
Brow
Brows
Meet
Reader
Stupid
More quotes by William H. Gass
What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
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
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
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
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 usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
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
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?
William H. Gass
Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.
William H. Gass
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
Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.
William H. Gass
Getting even is one reason for writing.
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
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
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
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
Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
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
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
[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
