William Gass

“I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.”

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.”

“Change is not progress.”

“The body is a device for measuring time.”

“So much of the world is canopied in color, cushioned in patterns, cluttered with shapes.”

“We must not achieve detachment, we must be detached.”

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”

“We are in the world, but the world is not in us.”

“Every story is a story about the storyteller.”

“The purpose of a sentence is to be a sentence.”

“Fiction is a house of many windows, but only two or three doors.”

“The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.”

“Many people who are said to be great are only celebrated.”

“A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of certainty.”

“The novelist, unlike the poet, doesn't have to be a master of the sentence; he only needs to be a master of the paragraph.”