146 Quotes by William H. Gass

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.