William H. Gass Quotes

I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'

I barely notice colors unless I taste them. Not the yellows or the greens. I taste the deeper blues. The darker reds.

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spot blues. Murky darkness. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.

Because I'm a synesthete I see characters in colors and I perceive a W as green.

I said, 'Ooh, Dad, I want the yellow ones.' He said, 'Where?' I said, 'Right there, Dad. I want the yellow ones.' Everybody goes, 'Those are green'. That's how I knew I was colorblind.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

The world speaks to me in colors, my soul answers in music.

A certain color tones you up. It's the concentration of timbres.

It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent.

When we sit down to draw or paint the sun's rays, we generally use yellow because in the morning and the evening with the blue light scattered away so strongly you're left with a little bit of red and it comes out yellowish.

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

The distinct blue, red, and yellow colors... though they have not the kind of harmony which is produced by a variety of broken and transparent colors, have the effect of grandeur.

Dark' and 'blackish' are not the same concept.

The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn't perceive such things outside of us.

The key of D is daffodil yellow, B major is maroon, and B flat is blue.

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

Color cannot stand alone.

I always see colors when I listen to music. It's difficult to explain, but when I hear the music I think about gold, blood rushing.

Maybe it's because I'm a designer, but when I am in a state of excitement, everything is so sharp and colorful and amazing, and I can look at blue and I see the yellow in it and the green in it, and the green-blues, the yellow-blues, so.

I've been thinking about where I want to take my live show. I want everything in it to be pink, gold, and black. I don't want people to feel any other colors, like brown or yellow.

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.

Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.

There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.