William H. Gass

One thing__ne thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.

Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean__ salt seems thinly shaken, of letdowns local as the sofa where I copped my freshman__ feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking.

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.

Some screw for science only in the afternoon, while others keep their faith with evening__ere Orcutt chuckled__t's a matter of light, I understand, but which makes which I can't remember.

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.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there__ 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

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__ pick up a page. All the words slide off.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

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

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 responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

It__ not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

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.

He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean__rivet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.

If someone asks me, __hy do you write?_ I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, __hy do you write the way you do?_ I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world__very cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.

Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well . . . completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.