William H. Gass

Quotes

• “In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more p...”
• “Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy my...”
• “Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. ...”
• “The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and...”
• “We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge th...”
• “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 d...”
• “Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is n...”
• “Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening—here Orcutt chuckled—it's a mat...”
• “For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flower...”
• “He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in ...”
• “Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day t...”
• “I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lin...”
• “As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ...”
• “They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.”
• “Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal”
• “Excellence is inconveniently difficult.”
• “I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.”