13 Quotes by William Gass

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

Books didn't figure in my family very much. . . . However, my grandmother's attic was full of old, old books . . . In the summers we would go to North Dakota to visit her, and I would get in that attic and read everything in sight. That's when the passion started. I was maybe eight or nine.

And the darkness of our bedroom is soon full of the fallen shadows of our failures.

If you believed yourself to be a writer of eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill-not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley.