Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" Don't write for money. "
William T. Vollmann
Money
Write
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The instant people specialize, it's in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon. "
William T. Vollmann
Interest
People
Instant
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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'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
Human
Brother
Woman
" 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
Happy
Day
Time
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" '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
Once
Than
British
" 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
" 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
" 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