Top 80 William H. Gass Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”

— William H. Gass

2. “I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.”

— William H. Gass

3. “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

4. “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

5. “Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.”

— William H. Gass

6. “Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.”

— William H. Gass

7. “Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.”

— William H. Gass

8. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

9. “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

10. “It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.”

— William H. Gass

11. “I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.”

— William H. Gass

12. “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

13. “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

14. “The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue.”

— William H. Gass

15. “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

16. “Surely it’s better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be.”

— William H. Gass

17. “The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.”

— William H. Gass

18. “As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour.”

— William H. Gass

19. “And I am in retirement from love.”

— William H. Gass

20. “We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world.”

— William H. Gass

21. “So–in short–color is consciousness itself, color is feeling, and shape is the distance color goes securely, as in our life we extend ourselves through neighborhoods and hunting grounds; while form in its turn is the relation of these inhabited spaces, in or out or up or down, and thrives on the difference between kitchen and pantry. This difference, with all its sameness, is yet another quality, alive in time like the stickiness of honey or the gently rough lap of a cat, for color is connection.”

— William H. Gass

22. “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

23. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “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

25. “When book and reader’s furrowed brow meet, it isn’t always the book that’s stupid.”

— William H. Gass

26. “I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.”

— William H. Gass

27. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

28. “Happiness is just a priest who reads us words of consolation while we walk up the steps to the hangman.”

— William H. Gass

29. “This Midwest. A dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; our outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time, as Alice both changed and remained in her story.”

— William H. Gass

30. “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

31. “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

32. “The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.”

— William H. Gass

33. “What else is soul but a listener?”

— William H. Gass

34. “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

35. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

36. “The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.”

— William H. Gass

37. “I’d like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.”

— William H. Gass

38. “Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal.”

— William H. Gass

39. “What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.”

— William H. Gass

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

40. “Getting even is one reason for writing.”

— William H. Gass

41. “I don’t know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it’s what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.”

— William H. Gass

42. “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

43. “The alcoholic trance is not just a haze, as though the eyes were also unshaven. It is not a mere buzzing in the ears, a dizzinessor disturbance of balance. One arrives in the garden again, at nursery time, when the gentle animals are fed and in all the world there are only toys.”

— William H. Gass

44. “There are few poets today who can equal, in their esthetic exploitation of language, in their depth of commitment to their medium, in their range of conceptual understanding, in the purity of their closed forms, the work of Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Broch, Gaddis, or Calvino, or any of half-a-dozen extraordinarily gifted South Americans.”

— William H. Gass

45. “I dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river. I’d follow a vein with the point of my finger, hold your bare feet in my naked hands.”

— William H. Gass

46. “Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.”

— William H. Gass

47. “It’s true there are moments – foolish moments, ecstasy on a tree stump – when I’m all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for I’m the sort now in the fool’s position of having love left over which I’d like to lose; what good is it now to me, candy ungiven after Halloween?”

— William H. Gass

48. “My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character.” – William H. Gass, “Finding a Form.”

— William H. Gass

49. “Sing, Susu, through your severed head, through your severed arteries; and I shall put my mouth to your lips as though you were such an instrument. My breath shall reinflate your brain. Susu, O bag of pipes, I approach you in my dreams.”

— William H. Gass

50. “And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha – none of the things you’d loved.”

— William H. Gass