William H. Gass Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• [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

  Real, Self, Firsts

  William H. Gass (1978). “The world within the word: essays”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

  William H. Gass

  Writing, Editors, Habit

  William H. Gass, Theodore G. Ammon (2003). “Conversations with William H. Gass”, p.38, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• 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

  Reading, Gossip, Crowds

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• Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

  William H. Gass

  Dream, Psychosis, House

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• We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.

  William H. Gass

  Liars, Mean, Wings

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• 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

  Art, Imagination, Empathy

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

  William H. Gass

  Ambition, Thinking, Together

  "William Gass, The Art of Fiction No. 65". Interview with Thomas LeClair, www.theparisreview.org. Summer 1977.

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• 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

  Voice, Wire, Connections

  William H. Gass (1968). “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & Other Stories”, p.191, David R. Godine Publisher

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• The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences.

  William H. Gass

  Night, Peaceful, Matter

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• 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

  Book, Tails, Gone

  "Habitations of the Word: Essays". Book by William H. Gass, www.nytimes.com. 1984.

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• 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.

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