William T. Vollmann Quotes

• I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing that stuff, that's great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they want with my image. I couldn't care less.

  William T. Vollmann

  Beautiful, Falling In Love, Race

  45 Copy quote

• So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk.

  William T. Vollmann

  Drinking, Book, Reading

  William T Vollmann (2005). “Europe Central”, p.510, Penguin

  19 Copy quote

• Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

  William T. Vollmann

  Memories, Life Is, Process

  William T. Vollmann (1994). “The rifles”, Viking Pr

  9 Copy quote

• Are you a censor? Do you tell people not to say “girl”? Shame on you! If nothing offends you, you’re a saint or you’re psychotic. If a few things offend you, deal with them--fairly. If you’re often offended by things, you’re probably a self-righteous asshole and it’s too bad you weren’t censored yourself--by your mother in an abortion clinic.

  William T. Vollmann

  Girl, Mother, Self

  12 Copy quote

• Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

  William T. Vollmann

  Religious, Angel, Letters

  William T Vollmann (2005). “Europe Central”, p.36, Penguin

  11 Copy quote

• Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible.

  William T. Vollmann

  Love, Trying, Hell

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Ordinary, Lessons, Patterns

  7 Copy quote

• Some friends and I, we went right up there behind the studio and we got on a train, we could tell it was going to go to Roseville. We got off it and got on another train. And we got to Roseville, and it takes hours to get through that yard. It's really big. So we ended up just coming back here. It's like fishing or hunting. You can't always come back with something.

  William T. Vollmann

  Hunting, Fishing, Yards

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  9 Copy quote

• Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?

  William T. Vollmann

  Dream, Night, Mushrooms

  William T. Vollmann (1993). “The ice-shirt”, Penguin Group USA

  8 Copy quote

• Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps.

  William T. Vollmann

  Cute, Sweet, Sorry

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Apology, Matter

  William T. Vollmann (1994). “Butterfly Stories: A Novel”, p.3, Grove Press

  4 Copy quote

• Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.

  William T. Vollmann

  4 Copy quote

• I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.

  William T. Vollmann

  Real, Nice, Reading

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Being Yourself, Father, White

  William T. Vollmann (2009). “Riding Toward Everywhere”, p.1, Harper Collins

  8 Copy quote

• I think that we're all, as human beings, so limited. If we want to write about ourselves, that's fairly easy. And if we write about our friends or our families, we can do that. But if we want to project ourselves somewhere beyond our personal experience we're going to fail unless we get that experience or we borrow it from others.

  William T. Vollmann

  Writing, Thinking, Want

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

• At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

  William T. Vollmann

  Successful, Fiction, Flaws

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• The instant people specialize, its in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.

  William T. Vollmann

  People, Function, Interest

  4 Copy quote

• You could imagine writing about a prostitute, for instance, but if you haven't spent time with prostitutes then you're going to get all these details wrong. But if you have a lot of sex with prostitutes and you're friends with prostitutes and you interview prostitutes, then maybe after many, many years you might be able to create prostitute characters.

  William T. Vollmann

  Sex, Writing, Character

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Character, Different

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Stars, Sky, Looks

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  6 Copy quote

• [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

  Writing, Thinking, Want

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Way, Remember

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are parts of L.A. that feel very, very Mexican, and there are weird little enclaves of Northside in Mexico - Cancún for instance. So what is a border?

  William T. Vollmann

  Mexican, Borders, Mexico

  4 Copy quote

• We're living in what used to be Mexico, and there's this very fluid border feeling. You go a little bit south of Tijuana, for instance, into Ensenada, and it still seems kind of borderlike. And you go much farther, suddenly the prices are lower, the prostitution is different, the commerce is different, everything feels more "Mexican."

  William T. Vollmann

  Mexican, Feelings, Different

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  California, Feelings, Borders

  4 Copy quote

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