Top 86 Vollmann Quotes
#2. I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
William T. Vollmann
#3. I read and write for most of the day, but I do let myself be interrupted by real life. I enjoy going out with friends and try not to take myself too seriously.
William T. Vollmann
#4. Well let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.
William T. Vollmann
#6. If I didn't feel that I was doing something or trying to do something for others, then I would have very little excuse for the life that I lead.
William T. Vollmann
#7. So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made ...
For propaganda, of course. It's all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?
William T. Vollmann
#8. Luck, like life itself, is no certain thing, but a loveliness which may alight upon my shoulder but more often seems to be some unknown brilliant quantity in motion.
William T. Vollmann
#9. There's an Inuit myth about the origin of the human race. There were two brothers, and the younger brother eventually gets changed into a woman. And that's how humans reproduced. And I thought, 'How could I really understand that?'
William T. Vollmann
#10. Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible.
William T. Vollmann
#11. My father hates organized religion, probably because he hates the God who killed his little girl back in 1968. I find religions variously bemusing.
William T. Vollmann
#12. Life is an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking in his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia.
William T. Vollmann
#13. I first got really interested in Noh in about 1977. There was an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana where I was going to high school. It was a really nice place. There was a New Directions paperback. It was the Pound/Fenollosa book, 'The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.'
William T. Vollmann
#14. Lovers may never meet again, but the ways of enemies oft do intersect: This proves some corollary about gravity.
William T. Vollmann
#15. I don't subscribe to organised religion. I've travelled enough to see that adherents of organised religion often attack adherents of other religions.
William T. Vollmann
#16. When I'm dying, I want to think I did what I felt was best for the words I was writing. This may mean, at any time, that I won't be publishable anymore.
William T. Vollmann
#17. Not only am I physically and emotionally attracted to women, I also wonder what being a woman would be like.
William T. Vollmann
#18. 'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'
William T. Vollmann
#19. A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal.
William T. Vollmann
#20. Although my work leads me to spend time with Nazi skinheads, diseased street prostitutes and homeless alcoholics, I do not have the strength of character to be a pathologist.
William T. Vollmann
#21. I don't believe in a personal god. It's good to give thanks, whether or not there's a god. There's no reason not to live life to the fullest. Morality is all the more important for people who don't expect to get a piece of celestial candy after they die.
William T. Vollmann
#22. At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.
William T. Vollmann
#23. [Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know." I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work.
William T. Vollmann
#24. I'm still a marginal figure living from book to book, but, as long as I'm producing labour as a good Marxist prole, I guess I'm satisfied.
William T. Vollmann
#25. If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble.
William T. Vollmann
#26. The instant people specialize, it's in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.
William T. Vollmann
#27. There was no one as good as he at using the ovens of logic to bake agreeable results.
William T. Vollmann
#28. The chronology was for the convenience of the reader who may be unfamiliar with some of the names and events mentioned. My publisher persuaded me to cut it, on account of the wartime paper shortage.
William T. Vollmann
#29. When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.
William T. Vollmann
#30. It's always, you know, a pleasant exercise to imagine my own death because then I'm so happy when I can stop.
William T. Vollmann
#31. As large publishers turn into monopolies, and the MBAs who are running them - maybe editors used to run them before - are steadily tightening the screws, they feel more and more that they get to call the shots.
William T. Vollmann
#32. The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles ...
William T. Vollmann
#33. [Uncentering the Earth] itself is uncentering in the best possible way. Vollmann is one of the deepest, most fully ensouled writers alive.
David Foster Wallace
#34. I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.
William T. Vollmann
#35. At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.
William T. Vollmann
#36. The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.
William T. Vollmann
#37. All that's happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there's only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions.
William T. Vollmann
#39. I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.
William T. Vollmann
#40. I've always felt I want to be of service to the world somehow. I haven't yet figured out how to do it, and I may never figure out how to do it.
William T. Vollmann
#41. Thus the protagonist of this Dream of mine is ooze, here and forever call'd Oozymandias the King.
William T. Vollmann
#43. Regardless of its textual component, Noh is ultimately indescribable, like sexual ecstasy; what consoles me for my failure of language is the fact that so is everything else. Moreover, Noh aspires to indescribability.
William T. Vollmann
#44. If I'm writing a book, and I'm warned, 'Oh, this is unsaleable, you need to make it shorter,' or, 'It has to be this, or that,' I'm proud to say I don't pay attention.
William T. Vollmann
#45. Across the street an addict was mumbling, his words, like Dan Smooth's, reminiscent of the structure of graphite, which is to say comprised of slender hexagonal plates of atoms which slough off at a touch like the multitudinous crusts of a Turkish pastry.
William T. Vollmann
#46. Bug, meanwhile, had learned at Marshtown that might made right, and he got older and paler, his head downcast like a nodding flower that expects itself to be cut at any moment.
William T. Vollmann
#48. Lecktrickery? grinned the fool boys, rubbing their rabbits' feet against the spell of these longest syllables in all Tarnation.
William T. Vollmann
#49. It was about as easy getting the Statue of Liberty to spread cunny, which did take some dynamite persuasion.
William T. Vollmann
#50. The blood kept welling up and getting over things so that she couldn't see what she was doing, which annoyed her; but she knew that theoretical clarity was unattainable in times of action.
William T. Vollmann
#51. I think most of us who live into our 50s have had a few experiences with death. You know, we see people we know start to die. We realize it's getting closer and closer for us.
William T. Vollmann
#52. (Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)
William T. Vollmann
#54. Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities
William T. Vollmann
#56. The case of Afghanistan vs. the Soviet Union is the clearest case of good against evil that I've seen in my lifetime. I thought it was terrific the way they got their country back.
William T. Vollmann
#57. Everybody is probably guilty of something. I'm sure that if anyone looked into my heart long enough, they could say, you know, 'Bill had some unkind thoughts back in second grade.'
William T. Vollmann
#59. When I go train hopping and I look up into the sky, there are always so many more stars than I remember there were.
William T. Vollmann
#60. (sunglasses make the world quieter and safer, as if you are viewing things behind smoked windows fronting your skull-house: you are inside and the world is outside, and the world cannot see into you; mirror sunglasses double the armor),
William T. Vollmann
#61. We always see ourselves as constant, and others as less so, no matter what policy shifts we ourselves may have been guilty of.
William T. Vollmann
#62. I go through all of my old notebooks, and I put an X on every page when everything has been entered into the computer, and sometimes that takes 15 years. But eventually the notebooks are full of X's, and they're no good to me anymore.
William T. Vollmann
#63. We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it's not people's art!
William T. Vollmann
#64. Precisely because I'm a man who is attracted to women, there may be some things that I have to say as a spectator of feminine grace that women themselves may not be able to see.
William T. Vollmann
#65. Such mental haziness is in order, given the delightful vagueness of the terrain.
William T. Vollmann
#66. I didn't vote for Bush, and I'm not happy particularly that he's president. But I will say I'm impressed that he didn't start bombing Afghanistan the day after Sept. 11. The more time that passes without him bombing Afghanistan, the more I respect him.
William T. Vollmann
#68. Expressiveness in others enriched Mrs. Singer's confidence in her own interpretations, possibly because a certain fear that she had not accomplished anything in her life left her all the more desirous of discovering easy clues to less consequential questions.
William T. Vollmann
#69. Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.
William T. Vollmann
#70. But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us ... and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us.
William T. Vollmann
#71. Generally speaking, the deader the author, the more worthwhile the work.
William T. Vollmann
#72. So much of the destruction on Earth has been wrought by men. Women are the ones who give life and try to pick up the pieces ... What a great gender they are.
William T. Vollmann
#73. Perhaps Bug and Tony should have been allies. But any successful structure of domination always gets the weak to reject each other.
William T. Vollmann
#74. Kabuki is the way that I so often write; Noh is how I would write if I were more 'spiritual,' more understated, or perhaps just older.
William T. Vollmann
#76. Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information.
William T. Vollmann
#77. My father grew up in an era when to be an American - a white American, at least - was to be yourself. In some respects, his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine.
William T. Vollmann
#78. This is my final book. Any subsequent productions bearing my name will have been composed by a ghost.
William T. Vollmann
#79. I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling.
William T. Vollmann
#80. But I don't think a river wants anything, except to be itself. Just like anybody and anything. I don't think it claimed a soul. I don't think it's at all vindictive or vicious, just itself. It just seemed very honest. If you hear a river moan, you know it has life.
William T. Vollmann
#81. Plato says that as one learns to love, the image of any specific beloved can be left behind for knowledge of the Good.
William T. Vollmann
#82. It's fun for me to try to write concise, compact things. It's a very good exercise for me. And I think it's important to try to do different things - change what I write about, and also the way I write. Otherwise, I'd just be repeating myself, which wouldn't be good for me or fair to my readers.
William T. Vollmann
#83. Whereas if I want to create a prostitute character now from memories of different prostitutes and inventing stuff, I can say, "this could happen," "this is quite plausible." But I don't feel I know enough about border life to do the latter.
William T. Vollmann
#85. Whenever we have an opportunity to engage with each other as human beings and to minimize the differences between us based on disparity in resources, then we should do it.
William T. Vollmann
#86. There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.
William T. Vollmann
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