It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play – the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life – its facility, its use. William H. Gass
About This Quote

In an article titled, “It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.â€� , Ernest Hemingway said “We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to playâ€� or according to Hemingway “the product of idleness and immoral ease.” This statement could be taken as a negative critique if taken out of context. However, if you look at the rest of the article Hemingway offers some interesting insight about reading and writing and why he does it.

Source: Fiction And The Figures Of Life

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More Quotes By William H. Gass
  1. Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
  2. It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
  3. For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
  4. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
  5. So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely...
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