Quotes from William H. Gass

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

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.

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

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.

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.

So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

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.

i suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called coach.

I want to rise so high that when I shit I won't miss anybody.

If you want to think about something really funny, kiddo, consider the fact that our favorite modern bad guys became villains by serving as heroes first--to millions. It is now a necessary apprenticeship.

Myth murdering myth: that's war these days.

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.

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.

Look: if a bird were to rub its beak on a limb, you'd hear it—sure—and if a piece of water were to move an unaccustomed way, you'd feel it—that's right—and if a fox were to steal a hen, you'd see-you'd see it—even in the middle of the night; but, heaven help you, if a friend a friend—god—were to slit your throat with his—his love—hoh, you'd bleed a week to notice it.

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.

time cannot do to ordinary things what we timelessly do to one another.

reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.

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

Wills aren't really strong or weak; it is the characters that they express and serve that are.

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.)

Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night...

Nature punishes gluttony, not avarice or hate.

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.