Top 80 William H. Gass Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.”

— William H. Gass

53. “Try to remember that artists in these catastrophic times, along with the serious scientists, are the only salvation for us, if there is to be any.”

— William H. Gass

54. “If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.”

— William H. Gass

55. “But they say that sexuality can be dangerously Dionysian. Nowhere do we need order more than at any orgy.”

— William H. Gass

56. “SAY IT. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one.”

— William H. Gass

57. “If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn’t fool around writing books.”

— William H. Gass

58. “Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone – in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.”

— William H. Gass

59. “Wills aren’t really strong or weak; it is the characters that they express and serve that are.”

— William H. Gass

60. “It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction’s fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can’t afford to play – the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn’t life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life – its facility, its use.”

— William H. Gass

61. “It’s a simple world for her. A curtain fluttering – that’s how she is – lives, moves – obediently, yet with every appearnace of freedom and caprice.”

— William H. Gass

62. “Such a person has no place. He can’t be found. He’s like one of those unphysical things they talk about in science now–like one of those things that’s moving, you know, always moving on, but through no space.”

— William H. Gass

63. “Excellence is inconveniently difficult.”

— William H. Gass

64. “We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming.”

— William H. Gass

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

— William H. Gass

66. “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

67. “Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn’t.”

— William H. Gass

68. “Her world must be flat because she disappeared all at once rather than a bit at a time.”

— William H. Gass

69. “Joseph thought he knew the plants that had sought out the twitterers, and those that had risen for the wren, or a fern that turned, not to the sun, but toward the chatter of the chickadee, so quick were the petals of its song, so sharp so plentiful so light, so showy in their symmetry, so suddenly in shade.”

— William H. Gass

70. “Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.”

— William H. Gass

71. “We were late among the living.”

— William H. Gass

72. “The hurt heart heals, but the healed heart still hurts. – From “Exile” in Finding a Form.”

— William H. Gass

73. “She crowds each moment with endeavor.”

— William H. Gass

74. “Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.”

— William H. Gass

75. “Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one’s mother into words... It may have been easier to put her in her grave.”

— William H. Gass

76. “If we had the true and complete history of one man – which would be the history of his head – we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, the vanities, the diminution of intelligence, the endless trivia we’d encounter, the ever present dust.”

— William H. Gass

77. “My face is muffled in my mother’s clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.”

— William H. Gass

78. “Furthermore, the sense of passion or of power, of depth and vibrancy, feeling and vision, we take away from any work is the result of the intermingling, balance, play, and antagonism between these: it is the arrangement of blues, not any blue itself, which lets us see the mood it formulates, whether pensive melancholy or thoughtless delight, so that one to whom aesthetic experience comes easily will see, as Schopenhauer suggested, sadness in things as readily as smoky violet or moist verdigris.”

— William H. Gass

79. “Nature punishes gluttony, not avarice or hate.”

— William H. Gass

80. “Still, the days were endurable and came and went like breath with only a few deep heaves to harm the pace.”

— William H. Gass

81. “They try to thrive. To multiply. To make murder a method of management.”

— William H. Gass

82. “I could not shake my point of view, infected as it was, and I took up their study with a manly passion.”

— William H. Gass

83. “A book is like a deck of windows.”

— William H. Gass

84. “Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed? Childhood is a lie of poetry.”

— William H. Gass

85. “They are merely partaking of the evolutionary miracle found most obviously in man, but not necessarily any more useful to his survival than a raven’s, or a cat’s, or a chimp’s is to its.”

— William H. Gass

86. “The secret of life is paying absolute attention to what is going on. The enemy of life is distraction. If you’re not present in the present, where the hell are you? Word of Wisdom No. 1.”

— William H. Gass