William H. Gass

“For me, the sentence is a sovereign state.”

“We must not hope to be mended but to be remade.”

“The first responsibility of a writer is to be a good writer. That's the first obligation.”

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

“A fiction, a history, a story, is a verb, and the question it answers is: what happened?”

“Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin.”

“Language is the house we live in.”

“The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”

“A metaphor is a kind of lie to help you see the truth.”

“We are what we read, and we are what we write.”

“There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.”

“Art is the final cunning of the human species.”

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

“The test of a good sentence is that it can't be improved.”

“Most people are not in the world, they're in their heads.”

“The past is not a place you can go to, but it is a place you can come from.”

“The body is a cathedral, and the mind is its priest.”