William H. Gass Quotes

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

There's always a bit of fiction in everything that I write.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

All I ever wanted to do is to write stories that people will enjoy and feel at home with.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I just feel so lucky to tell stories and make up stories and share them with people.

Getting to share the stories in my head with other people and have them enjoy those stories, and having them come to see my characters as real. That's so cool.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

A book can be wonderful and powerful and accessible and artful all at the same time.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.