Latest William H. Gass Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Otters, Style, Slides

  Source: theuntranslated.wordpress.com

• 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

  Teacher, Jobs, Teaching

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

• 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

  Art, Philosophy, Organization

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

• 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

  Book, Ideas, World

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

• I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I'm talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it's a matter of decorum, basically.

  William H. Gass

  Thinking, Talking, People

  The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. November 2005.

• I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I've done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don't complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words; he needed them. But these other people [modern philosophers] are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.

  William H. Gass

  Hate, Philosophy, People

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

• I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.

  William H. Gass

  Hate, Desire, Jargon

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.