William Howard Gass is an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor.

“I don’t know myself, what to do, where to go… I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort… it’s what the world offers… please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.”

“We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.”