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" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
William T. Vollmann
Running
Used
Feel
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Americans worry that Afghanistan has become a petri dish in which the germs of Islamic fanaticism are replicating - soon Afghans will be hijacking American planes and bombing embassies everywhere. And their fears are not necessarily unfounded. The Taliban are unemployed war veterans, ready and even eager to return to the battlefield. "
William T. Vollmann
Veterans
War
American
" 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
" 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'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
" 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
Religions
Religion
Attack
" 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
Friends
Experience
Think
" 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
People
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Women
Man
Say
" 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
Me
Good
" 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
" Don't write for money. "
William T. Vollmann
Money
Write
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Write
More
Me
" 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
" 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
Religion
God
Girl
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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