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" A common measure of poverty is how much money you have in relation to other people - that is useful as far as it goes, but that excludes the case of, say, a hunter in the rainforest who has no money but is not poor. And there can be a number of people with money but who can consider themselves unwanted or invisible or estranged from society. "

William T. Vollmann

Poverty

Society

" Don't write for money. "

William T. Vollmann

Money

Write

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It's always, you know, a pleasant exercise to imagine my own death because then I'm so happy when I can stop. "

" The instant people specialize, it's in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that's the failure of the listener, or the journalist who retells it badly. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" '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!' "

" 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. "

" 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

Writing

Attention

" 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

Page

Good

" 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. "

" Not only am I physically and emotionally attracted to women, I also wonder what being a woman would be like. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" When I go train hopping and I look up into the sky, there are always so many more stars than I remember there were. "

" 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

Spiritual

Just

" 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. "

" 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. "