Top 30 William T. Vollmann Quotes

Words matter. These are the best William T. Vollmann Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I read and write for most of the day, but I do let myse

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
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
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
There have been times when I’m writing about things that are personally embarrassing. Like any human being, sometimes I can’t help but wonder – ‘What are the people I know going to think about this?’ So I have to remind myself that all is permissible. Art has to be a free space. Language has to be a free space.
William T. Vollmann
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
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
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
Whenever I travel to a poor country, I try to help at least one person. Usually, that person helps me just as much – I can find a local poor person to be my guide or my interpreter. That person makes money from me, I make money from him or her, we both learn about each other. It’s an equal win-win relationship.
William T. Vollmann
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
I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
William T. Vollmann
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
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
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
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
As I get older, I find myself getting angrier and angrier. Doubtless, change itself, not to mention physical decline and inevitable petty tragedies of disappointed expectations, would have made for resentment in any event; but I used to be a passive schoolboy, my negative impulses turned obediently inward.
William T. Vollmann
The instant people specialize, it’s in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.
William T. Vollmann
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
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
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
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
When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they’d kind of be like popcorn kernels popping… all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density.
William T. Vollmann
Once you’ve finished typing and moving text around and everything else, you have to leave it alone for a while. You do that to see if it stands up, to see if all the loose edges have been trimmed, if it makes sense, if it’s consistent, what shape it really has. You can’t tell that while you’re working on it.
William T. Vollmann
The first chance I had to go to Japan, which was in the early nineties, I went to a Noh play. I thought, ‘This is very, very slow.’ I noticed lots of people falling asleep. I didn’t really know what was going on; I was getting a little sleepy myself. Then the more I studied it, the more fascinated I got.
William T. Vollmann
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
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
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
Really what it gets down to is that my idea of the American life, the American dream, whatever, is that I can do what I wish in the privacy of my own home. And as long as I’m not hurting anyone, no one has a right to know what I do. The main thing that I have to hide is that I don’t have anything to hide.
William T. Vollmann
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
‘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
Don’t write for money.
William T. Vollmann