Literary Birthday – 30 July – William H. Gass

William H. Gass was born on 30 July 1924 and died on 7 December 2017.

William H. Gass Quotes

1. Getting even is one reason for writing.
2. Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.
3. For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mousetrap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol centre. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
4. The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
5. 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.
6. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
7. For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
8. It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.
9. A cause is a lie with a fan club.
10. 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’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

William H. Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. He won three National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He received the American Book Award for his 1995 novel, The Tunnel. Gass called his fiction works ‘experimental constructions’, and each of his books contains stylistic innovations. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘Gass’s lush, acrobatic style has been criticised by some as being achieved at the expense of characterization, plot, and such conventions as punctuation.’ He taught at The College of Wooster for four years, Purdue University for sixteen years, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969–1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979–1999).

Source for Image: By David Shankbone – Own work, CC BY 3.0
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Gass_2011_Shankbone.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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