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" 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

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" After college, I went to San Francisco and worked as a secretary in a reinsurance company. That was a pretty dismal job. It was a real small place. Guys would come in, and they'd sort of stick out their arms like wings so I could take their coats off. They'd tell me, 'Two,' and I'd put two lumps of sugar in their coffee. "

William T. Vollmann

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

" Don't write for money. "

William T. Vollmann

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" '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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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