Quotes from William H. Gass

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.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. —William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.

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

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

Some people say their life is full of darkness and I wonder why they don't just try and switch the lights on.

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

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.

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

And I am in retirement from love.

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

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.

For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.

It is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

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.

Excellence is inconveniently difficult.