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" 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
Satisfied
Book
Good
Related Quotes:
" 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
Beautiful
Back
Popcorn
" 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
Tell
Moving
Alone
" 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
Life
Great
Gender
" Don't write for money. "
William T. Vollmann
Money
Write
" 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
Oh
Attention
" Not only am I physically and emotionally attracted to women, I also wonder what being a woman would be like. "
William T. Vollmann
Wonder
Woman
Women
" 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
Trying
Life
Others
" 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
Myself
Know
Chance
" 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
School
Book
High School
" 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
Travel
Relationship
Money
" 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
Try
Enjoy
Friends
" 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
Myself
People
Space
" 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
Dying
Best
Writing
" 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
Death
Think
People
" 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
Look
Sky
Train
" 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
Heart
Enough
Thoughts
" 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
Stop
You
Death
" So far, I've never missed a deadline for a term paper, a review, a manuscript. I perform the mumbo-jumbo of voting with belief in my heart, I've not yet won even a jaywalking ticket, and unlike my father, whom I fault in this respect, I refrain from opting out of jury duty; instead, they mostly kick me out. "
William T. Vollmann
Me
Respect
Voting
" 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
Yourself
Be Yourself
American
" 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
World
Always
Never
" 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
Home
American
American Dream
" 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
Me
Change
Fun
" The instant people specialize, it's in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon. "
William T. Vollmann
Interest
People
Instant
" 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
Negative
Myself
Expectations
" 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
Live
Own
School
" 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
Thought
Back
Evil
" 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
Human
Differences
Opportunity
" 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
More
Just
" I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting. "
William T. Vollmann
World
Interesting
Enjoy
" 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
Me
Coffee
Small