William T. Vollmann famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing that stuff, that's great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they want with my image. I couldn't care less.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Beautiful #Falling In Love #Race
So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Drinking #Book #Reading
Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Memories #Life Is #Process
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

#Being Yourself #Father #White
The instant people specialize, its in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.
-- William T. Vollmann

#People #Function #Interest
Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Cute #Sweet #Sorry
Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?
-- William T. Vollmann

#Dream #Night #Mushrooms
Just for the hell of it, try to love someone as unlike you as possible.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Love #Trying #Like You
I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I'm dying, I'll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn't bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Jobs #Book #Angel
It will be fun to give some to prostitutes,
-- William T. Vollmann

#Fun #Giving
Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, ***** causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?
-- William T. Vollmann

#Religious #Angel #Why Not
Are you a censor? Do you tell people not to say â€œgirlâ€? Shame on you! If nothing offends you, youâ€™re a saint or youâ€™re psychotic. If a few things offend you, deal with them--fairly. If youâ€™re often offended by things, youâ€™re probably a self-righteous ***** and itâ€™s too bad you werenâ€™t censored yourself--by your mother in an abortion clinic.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Girl #Mother #Self
Death cannot be experienced either by the dead or the living.
-- William T. Vollmann
Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Lessons #Patterns #Weapons
I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Real #Nice #Reading
If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble.
-- William T. Vollmann

#Writing #Apology #Matter

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