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Conversations with William H. Gass QUOTES

Conversations with William H. Gass QUOTES

1 " Mullinax: This of course gets to the notion of fiction as a separate world, and not as an appendage of some sort to the "real" world. The idea that we should let fiction be fiction, and not philosophy or sociology or psychology.


Gass: Right. We've allowed music to be music. Oh we try, of course, to make it out to be something else. We use music in a roundabout way. Music to make love by, all that stuff. But we don't normally go around regarding music as anything more than music, and not as a message to the world or this or that. And we're doing that more and more with poetry. Fiction is slower to get there because it's been attached to doing all these other things. Art shouldn't try to make you do something, or even to produce in the reader a feeling or emotion. Its aim is construction. The artist wants to create an object that has intrinsic value, something worth living with as an end in itself. The artist makes an object he can have a non-utilitarian relation to—a companion. "

― William H. Gass , Conversations with William H. Gass