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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Respect

Voting

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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?' "

" 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.' "

" I don't subscribe to organised religion. I've travelled enough to see that adherents of organised religion often attack adherents of other religions. "

" 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. "

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

" My father hates organized religion, probably because he hates the God who killed his little girl back in 1968. I find religions variously bemusing. "

" 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. "

" 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

Coffee

Small

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "