William T. Vollmann
William T. Vollmann
William Tanner Vollmannis an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Europe Central. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 July 1959
CountryUnited States of America
change compact exercise fair good repeating
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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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.