Quotes from William S. Wilson

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do. But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")

The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")

It's my side. I have found the pain. It is in my side, and I isolate it and define it, and arrange the other pains around it. I tell myself that pain is information, that I am learning to map the spaces of my own body. Then my body's feelings cascade toward my side, and pain pours over its outlines and erases them. ("Marriage")

evolution propels itself by an inclination toward its next probable achievement." ("Desire")

Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. ("America: Three Audiences")

Passionless is vulgar ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")

each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.

I have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")