William H. Gass
William H. Gass
William Howard Gassis an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor. He has written three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which have won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts, won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 July 1924
CountryUnited States of America
So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them
I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.
Getting even is one reason for writing.
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.
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.
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.
I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I'm talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it's a matter of decorum, basically.
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.
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.