Quotes by William H. Gass

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

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.

For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.

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.

Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.

The death of God represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condones it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.

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

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

We have scarcely gotten home... when our children's sneezes greet us, skinned knees bleed after waiting all day to do so.

Getting even is one reason for writing.