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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
Always
Furrowed
Brow
Brows
Meet
Reader
Stupid
Book
More quotes by William H. Gass
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
What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.
William H. Gass
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
William H. Gass
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
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
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
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
If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
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
Getting even is one reason for writing.
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 true alchemists do not change lead into gold they change the world into words.
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
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
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
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
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
What else is soul but a listener?
William H. Gass
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William H. Gass
