146 Quotes by William H. Gass

As a teacher, it’s a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don’t believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.

A book is like a deck of windows.

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.

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

The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it’s – like Aristotle’s Physics – an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

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

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

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal.

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.